MATTHEWS, Glenna - Just A Housewife: The Rise & Fall of Domesticity in America

"Just a Housewife"
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"JUST A
HOUSEWIFE"
The Rise and Fall of Domesticity

in America
GLENNA MATTHEWS
OXFORD U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
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and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1987 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
First published in 1987 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1989
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Matthews, Glenna.
"Just a housewife."
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Women—United States—Social conditions.
2. Housewives—United States—History—19th century.
3. Housewives—United States—History—20th century.
I. Title.
HQ1410.M38 1987 305.4'2'0973 86-33318
ISBN 0-19-503859-2
ISBN 0-19-505925-5 (pbk)
"Housewife" from All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton.

Copyright ©1961, 1962 by Anne Sexton. Reprinted by
permission of Houghton Mifflin Company and
The Sterling Lord Agency, Inc.
4 6 8 10 9 7 5
Printed in the United States of America
To my parents, Glen Ingles and Alberta Nicolais Ingles,
and to the memory of my grandmother,
Annie Delullo Nicolais
Preface
t he
tHE READERS of the followingO pages
I O will soon deduce that I
have more than a passing interest in the plight of the housewife:
I was a suburban housewife for a number of years. Coming of age
in the late 1950s, I followed the path of much of my age cohort, a
path that included early marriage and early motherhood. Through a
combination of incredible naivete and considerable ignorance, I some-
how maintained the belief that I would go on to do graduate work
despite this. I was rarely frustrated, because it never occurred to me
that I had forfeited the chance to have an academic career. At the
same time, I noticed that my sister housewives and I were accorded
little respect in the culture, and that frequently made me angry. So
it is not surprising that, after a struggle to obtain a doctorate, the
likes of which I never would have dreamed of in advance, I have
written a book about housewives and the lack of respect from which
we all suffered.
I was fortunate indeed to be able to attend Stanford University
for my graduate work and to study with Carl Degler. He was one of
the few established historians in the country, I am sure, who was
prepared to take a "re-entry" woman seriously in 1969. Beyond this
obvious fact, he and the other historians with whom I studied at
viiii PREFACE
Stanford set a standard of intellectual vitality and passion for our

discipline for which I will always be grateful. I think of my graduate
school career as having provided intellectual capital upon which I
will be able to draw for the rest of my life.
Upon graduating, I moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, where I
taught at Oklahoma State University. I will always be grateful, too,
to supportive colleagues and administrators there. In a time of finan-
cial stringency, I received generous research support. My colleague
H. James Henderson shared with me his breadth of knowledge about
colonial America and critiqued an early version of Chapter i. Con-
versations with Adelia Hanson sharpened my ideas about the role
of the housewife. Another great boon resulting from my Oklahoma
years was the chance to become acquainted with Angie Debo, a
much-loved friend and much-esteemed role model as a pioneering
woman historian.
These are the general circumstances from which this book arose.
The specific circumstances are as follows. In 1978 I gave a birthday
party for a historian friend, and after dinner a group of us—by coin-
cidence, all historians—sat around discussing The Feminization of
American Culture by Ann Douglas. As the talk swirled around me,
I wondered to myself who could speak for the housewife in this dis-
course, and I then resolved to do the job myself when I felt ready.
Conversations early on with Kathryn Kish Sklar and George Fred-
rickson were useful in focusing my ideas.
In 1982-83 I received an ACLS Fellowship to support my research
and embarked on a year of travel. During this year I was the bene-
ficiary of help from librarians and archivists who gave of their time
to point me in the right direction and also from friends who gave
me hospitality while I was on the road. In particular, I join the ever-
growing list of scholars who regard the Schlesinger Library of
Women's History at Radcliffe as a second home, because its superb
staff is so welcoming. Barbara Haber, Patricia King, Elizabeth
Shenton, and Eva Moseley are justly celebrated as representing the
highest professional and the warmest human standards. Friends who
entertained me during this year—sometimes for unconscionably
PREFACE ix
lengthy stays—include Sandra Mahoney, Larry Mahoney, Debbie

Harvey, Michel Dahlin, David Ruchman, Roderick McDonald,
Lynn McDonald, Deborah Gardner, Pat Hills, and Kevin Whitfield.
In addition to help from Oklahoma State University and the
ACLS Fellowship, the writing of this book was possible because of
a legacy from my late aunt, Thelma Ingles. I can only hope that she
would have approved of it. She herself was a remarkable woman
whose nursing career was devoted to upgrading the standing of nurses
in the medical profession and to upgrading the standard of nursing
in Third World countries.
I have benefited greatly from the help of friends and colleagues
who read all or part of the manuscript. Susan Harris read the first
seventy pages in rough draft and gave me criticism that was as useful
as it was tough-minded. She then read the entire first draft, as did
Meredith Marsh. Londa Schiebinger read Chapter 5 (on Darwin-
ism), which I subsequently presented to an audience of Darwinists
at the Seventeenth International History of Science Congress in
Berkeley in August 1985. Mark Kornbluh, Mary Kelley, and Estelle
Freedman read the manuscript at a later stage. Needless to say, I am
solely responsible for the various interpretations—error-ridden as
some of my critics may deem them to be! My editor at Oxford Uni-
versity Press, Sheldon Meyer, showed faith in the project from our
earliest conversation on the subject and sustained me throughout the
writing of the book, and Stephanie Sakson-Ford did an excellent job
of copyediting. Jackie Stevens gathered the data in the Appendix,
and Dan Silin arranged them in tabular form. Karen Matthews and
Dan Silin helped with the proofreading.
A book on the subject of domesticity clearly owes much to domes-
ticity shared and to friendship. In addition to the friends named
above I want to thank Barbara Baer, Monica Loewi, John Snetsinger,
Jan Duffy, Dorothy Schrader, Etta Perkins, and Nathanael Silin be-
cause all of them have made a difference in my life.
Lastly, I want to thank my family for their encouragement and
support. The dedication only begins to suggest what I owe to my
parents and to my late grandmother. Other family members whose
X PREFACE
loving support has been important are my aunt, Norma Cook, and
my cousins, Robert Nicolais and the late John Nicolais. My two
children, Karen and David, made—and continue to make, as they
come home for visits with their friends—my own experience of do-
mesticity a wonderful part of my life.
Berkeley, California G. M.
January 1987
Contents
Introduction, xiii
ONE
The Emergence of a New Ideology, 3
TWO
The Golden Age of Domesticity, 35
THREE
Domestic Feminism and the World Outside the Home, 66
FOUR
Toward an Industrialized Home, 92
FIVE
Darwinism and Domesticity: The Impact of
Evolutionary Theory on the Status of the Home, 116
six
The Housewife and the Home Economist, 145
SEVEN
Domesticity and the Culture of Consumption, 172
EIGHT
Naming the Problem, 197
Afterword, 223
Notes, 227
Appendix, 263
Index, 269
Introduction
ifjJu STARTED THIS BOOK with the dawning realization that while
American women were relegated to a separate domestic sphere in
1850, it was a sphere that was central to the culture. One hundred
years later, most American women were still functioning as house-
wives in some fashion, but the home was no longer central, and this
made the role of housewife much more problematic for those who
filled it. In fact, by the mid-twentieth century many women had
begun to think of themselves as "just a housewife."*
In 1850 a housewife knew she was essential not only to her family
but also to her society. History would be affected by the cumulative
impact of women creating good homes. Advice books, popular novels,
and even the writings of male intellectuals set forth this theme and
elaborated the ideal of the "notable housewife." In 1950, the subur-
ban, middle-class housewife was doubly isolated: physically, by the
nature of housing patterns, and spiritually, because she had become
merely the general factotum for her family. She was a cog in the
economic machine, necessary for the maintenance of national pros-
* See the Appendix for statistics about percentages of women in the
work force. Only 5.6 percent of married women were gainfully employed
outside the home as late as 1900.
XIV INTRODUCTION
perity but overlooked in discussions of the gross national product.

The desperate letters sent to Betty Friedan after she identified "the
problem that has no name"—that is, the emptiness of many house-
wives' lives—testify to the damage inflicted by the twentieth-century
version of domesticity.1
I think it is obvious from the above that feminists need to
take a serious, sustained, and sympathetic interest in the home be-
cause it is too valuable an institution to leave to Phyllis Schlafly
and others who take a negative view of feminism. In the first place,
women are less likely to convince those with whom they share
households to become equal partners in the performance of domestic
duties—as opposed to "helping" with the housework—if they deni-
grate and devalue these duties. In the second place, I think that a
humane society has a stake in the optimal performance of domestic
duties; in short, that the home truly does have important social func-
tions that have been undervalued for several generations. Children
need not only to be nurtured but also to be trained to be caring and
socially responsible adults. Adults of both sexes need to receive emo-
tional refreshment—as well as give it—in order to be effective as citi-
zens and workers. Moreover, men and women who live alone can
create hospitable homes that they share with friends, thereby also
creating socially valuable institutions.
Women themselves have unquestionably been the big losers in
the devaluation of domesticity. Homes may be more or less elaborate,
housework may be more or less professionalized, but there will al-
ways remain an irreducible residue of effort required to maintain the
place where people live. If such work is despised, it will be per-
formed by someone whose sex, class, or race—perhaps all three-
consign her to an inferior status. If such work is despised, we will be
much more likely to allow corporate America to manipulate the
nature of homes and of housework. There was, for instance, no
technological imperative in the Industrial Revolution that insured
that in 1960 a middle-class housewife would serve TV dinners while
spending an inordinate amount of time acting as chauffeur for the
rest of her family. This came about because women's traditional skills
and women's time were both undervalued.
INTRODUCTION XV
It should be pointed out, too, that valuing the home and the skill
involved in performing domestic duties that have traditionally been
female does not mean endorsing the position that those duties should
always be performed by a woman. In a society with a completely
egalitarian gender system, both sexes could perform work around
the house and take pride in doing a good job. After all, domestic
tasks, other than the most menial, can have more of an immediate
emotional "payoff" than most jobs in complex organizations. What
has made domestic tasks especially obnoxious has been the fact that
they have been ascribed only to women and that women have thereby
been put in the position of rendering non-reciprocal personal service
to those they love.
I hope that the ensuing pages will contribute to the discussion of
what "home" can and should represent to feminists now. This is be-
cause we have a rich heritage from the past. For example, in the nine-
teenth century—before domesticity suffered its decline—Antoinette
Brown Blackwell spoke of how women could move from "bound to
rebound" between home and the world with energies for both. She
understood that this would be possible only if men were to enter
into a fair share of responsibility for the life of the home. Moreover,
in a letter to Lucy Stone, she spoke of wanting "to give and take
some home comfort" herself. It seems to me that Blackwell's vision
of giving and taking home comfort while participating actively in
the world is peculiarly appropriate for women of today. BlackwelPs
ideas demonstrate, too, that one can enthusiastically support the
value of "home" without endorsing a program of sexual asymmetry.
And now a word about my sources and general approach. In order
to cover a substantial sweep of time and examine the status of domes-
ticity as it was affected by such critical developments as industrializa-
tion, secularization, the culture of professionalism, and the appear-
ance of consumerism, I have opted for cultural, as opposed to social,
history. By this I mean that I have not used "history-from-the-
bottom-up" sources because to do so for the period of time covered
by this study would be the labor of a lifetime. Where I used manu-
script or archival material, it reflected the experiences of well-known
women like Elizabeth Cady Stan ton, Susan B. Anthony, or Harriet
XVI INTRODUCTION
Beecher Stowe rather than those of a typical housewife. I am neces-

sarily painting with a broad brush, and subsequent scholars will no
doubt refine—if they do not discard!—my generalizations. This is an
exploratory essay on a huge subject, rather than a definitive statement.
At the same time I must point out that my sources go beyond the
ideas of a highly educated elite. In addition to Emerson, Hawthorne,
and Darwin, I have read potboilers, best-selling cookbooks, popular
magazines, and advice books. In general, I asked myself where the
images of home and of housewife would be most reliably reflected.
Moreover, I made pilgrimages to a number of old kitchens and was
allowed to go "backstage" at the Smithsonian and handle some of
the utensils so as to have a better understanding of them than merely
looking at them would permit. In other words, I tried to be as imagi-
native as possible in thinking about the interaction between material
culture and ideas.
Nonetheless, I must freely acknowledge that my sources are prin-
cipally confined to the middle class. The ideology of domesticity
arose in the middle class and may well have been one of the principal
means by which the middle class assumed a self-conscious identity
in the antebellum period. Much more research must be done before
we know the extent to which working-class families subscribed to
the ideology. I am especially curious about the existence of the ideal
among slave families. Since black women did so much of the skilled
cookery in the southern states, one would like to know if they were
able to develop a craft tradition or if the conditions under which
they worked were simply too oppressive for this development to take
place.
Finally, let me explain my use of the word "housewife" rather
than the more modern term "homemaker." "Housewife" had a long
and honorable history, even if the women who filled the position
were denied full participation in their society. It is the argument of
this study that, in the nineteenth century, American housewives
even contrived to occupy a relatively respected position in the cul-
ture. I suspect that the term "homemaker" made its appearance more
or less simultaneously with the devaluation of domesticity, a public
INTRODUCTION XVii
relations gesture to cover up the loss of prestige for the job. In the
Utopian future of which I dream, neither term would be appropriate
since all adults would perform a fair share of the work involved in
maintaining the domestic environment.
"Just a Housewife"
0NE
The Emergence of a New Ideology
iIN n 1750 THE COLONIAL AMERICAN HOME was an essential locus

of production for the entire society. The overwhelming majority of
colonists lived outside the cities and made many of the items that
later Americans would routinely buy in stores. Soap required home
manufacture, bread must be baked at home, bacon cured, and cloth-
ing pieced together for growing families, because consumer goods
were not commercially available. This in turn created a demanding
job for the housewife. A small percentage of wealthy women may
have escaped performing domestic duties, but for most women chores
were arduous and unending. The housewife was, however, in charge
of a team that kept the household supplied and functioning. Many
housewives had help from a "hired" girl even if they had no full-
time servants, and they could count on regular assistance from mem-
bers of their own families.1 Even children had routine chores to
perform that added to the productive capacity of the household. This
"team" helped make the economy function smoothly, too.
The importance of home production for the survival of the society
does not mean, however, that either the home or the person in charge
of domestic tasks was highly valued at the time. A leading scholar of
the eighteenth-century woman, Mary Beth Norton, argues that be-
3
4 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
fore the American Revolution women were frequently apologetic

about their roles. To be a good housewife "was conceived to be an
end in itself, rather than as a means to a greater or more meaningful
goal."2 Hence women described their work as "my Narrow sphere,"
"my humble duties," or "my little Domestick affairs."3 In other
words, a home was seen as serving the purely private ends of provid-
ing for the needs of those who lived in it, and the housewife had no
reason to think of herself as vitally linked with the world outside the
home. With that world her connection was limited principally to
church attendance and local market activities. In fact, Norton speaks
of a "dichotomy between male public activity and female private
passivity."
If the home was taken for granted, so too was the fact that the
distribution of power within the home was hierarchical. Although
the wife might supervise the day-by-day performance of domestic
chores, the weight of authority in the household clearly rested with
the husband, who was seen as a moral arbiter as well as the ultimate
decision-maker in the marriage. As husband was to wife, so father
was to child with respect to being the source of moral authority. The
emotional ties between mother and child were much less salient than
they were to become in the nineteenth century because discipline
rather than nurturing warmth was the prime consideration in paren-
tal treatment of children. Finally, the father's authority within the
family reflected patriarchal patterns of authority in other aspects of
colonial American culture.4
Another generalization that can be offered about the colonial home
in 1750 has to do with the distribution of chores. Much has been
made of the separation of male and female spheres of activity under
the impact of industrialization. It seems increasingly clear, however,
that while the two sexes may have been working in physical proxim-
ity in pre-industrial America, their jobs were highly differentiated.
Men tended the orchards, for example, while women preserved the
fruit. Men or boys chopped the firewood, while women tended the
fires. Each sex stuck to its own tasks except under conditions of du-
ress, such as the absence or illness of a spouse.8
THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW IDEOLOGY 5
The physical appearance of the home might vary from colony to

colony because of the differences in culture and in available building
materials. For the tiny minority of colonists who lived in cities, homes
had a more elaborate style of architecture as well as more gracious
appointments. What the homes had in common, however, except for
the small number of those belonging to the wealthy, was their modest
size, especially considering the dimensions of the typical household
of parents, several children, hired help, and possibly apprentices.
The notion of a "room of one's own" was unknown to colonial so-
ciety, and privacy was an unheard-of luxury.
Moreover, there is reason to believe that in 1750 the ordinary home
was only beginning to have enough consumer goods to make possible
a comfortable style of domesticity. Scholars who have studied probate
inventories suggest that most homes in colonial America beyond those
of the luxury-owning elite were equipped with only sparse necessities
until some time in the mid-eighteenth century.8 Around 1750, tea
services, for example, began to show up in non-elite households.7
These in turn would have enhanced the style of female sociability
possible in ordinary homes.
In 1750 cooking was done over an open hearth with relatively few
and unspecialized utensils.8 For all but the households of the wealthy,
the diet was plain and possessed little variety. In New England, salt
meat provided most of the animal protein, and peas porridge was the
other staple. Bread was usually "rye 'n injun"—cornmeal was then
known as Indian meal—because wheat flour was scarce. Dairy prod-
ucts were needed to make up part of the protein requirements of
the very utilitarian diet, hence butter was rarely available for fancy
baking. Vegetables showed up as afterthought in the meals, rather
than as part of a carefully thought-out menu. Such cookbooks as
existed had been published in Britain and were unlikely to be con-
sulted beyond the urban elite. In consequence of all of this, cooking
was a purely utilitarian function and not a highly prized skill: there
is no evidence to suggest that women thought in terms of "culinary
art." Rather, they would put a meal to simmer over the fire in the
open hearth and go about their other business.9 Hence, for a variety
6 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
of reasons, in 1750 domestic chores were likelier to be approached as

matter-of-fact routines than as occasions for displays of female prow-
ess or as possessing ceremonial meaning.
The colonial home, then, was both essential and mundane, mun-
dane because it had no transcendent functions. What is more, noth-
ing in the culture reflected glory on the woman in charge of the
home. Literary heroines of eighteenth-century British novels, for ex-
ample, were noteworthy for their purity and gentleness and not for
their domestic skills.
By 1850 all of this had changed. The home was so much at the
center of the culture that historians speak of a "cult" of domesticity
in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Women in their homes were
the locus of moral authority in the society. Further, in the 18505
women could read an outpouring of novels in which housewives
figured in highly positive terms. Best-selling cookbooks of the day
reveal a much more varied cuisine, even for middle-class households,
than had prevailed in the colonial period. In short, domesticity was
both more elaborate and more valued, and this, in turn, meant that
the housewife had access to new sources of self-esteem. How did the
changes come about?
Perhaps the most important factor in elevating the status of the
home was the role home played in the polity after the American
Revolution. In fact, the intermingling of the domestic and the politi-
cal began even earlier than the war itself, with the boycott of British-
made goods. What had been viewed by men and women alike as a
set of petty concerns—the kind of cloth to be employed in making a
suit, for example—acquired a whole new political relevance. The
boycotts would not have worked without the cooperation of women
acting within their own households, and this gave women a new self-
respect and a rationale for entering into political discussions. In con-
sequence, "the public recognition accorded the female role irreversibly
altered its inferior status."10
But it was the widespread concern over how best to socialize citi-
zens after the war that had the largest impact. There were no prece-
dents for a republic on the scale of the United States. Many people
believed that the new nation would require the support of a uniquely
public-spirited citizenry. If citizens must learn to place a high value

on the public interest, this was a lesson they would need to begin in
childhood. Thus the home became crucial to the success of the na-
tion and women—whose education began to be taken much more seri-
ously than ever before—gained the role of "Republican Mother," to
use the term coined by Linda Kerber. Kerber asserts:
The notion that a mother can perform a political function rep-

resents the recognition that a citizen's political socialization
takes place at an early age, that the family is a basic part of
the system of political communication and that patterns of fam-
ily authority influence the general political culture. Yet most
premodern political societies—and even some fairly modern
democracies—maintained unarticulated, but nevertheless very
firm, social restrictions that isolated the female domestic world
from politics. The willingness of the American woman to over-
come this ancient separation brought her into the all-male po-
litical community. In this sense Republican Motherhood was a
very important, even revolutionary, invention. It altered the
female domain in which most women had always lived out
their lives; it justified women's absorption and participation in
the civic culture.11
The home in effect gained a function so political that the domestic

sphere could influence the outcome of history. Indeed, the home al-
ready had influenced the outcome of history during the 17705 when
patriots had put pressure on the British by altering the pattern of
colonial consumption. What this meant was that the female sphere
was no longer entirely private. Catharine Beecher's A Treatise on
Domestic Economy of 1841, a prime document of the cult of domes-
ticity because it combined citations from the work of Tocqueville
with explicit instructions on laundry, may be seen as the logical out-
growth of the politicization of the home after the Revolution.
That the political culture engendered by the Revolution found its
way into American homes is particularly well demonstrated by the
first American cookbook, which appeared in Hartford in 1796. Amelia
Simmons's American Cookery exemplifies both the changing culinary
8 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
standards of the eighteenth century and a strongly patriotic sensi-

bility. By the 17905 American cuisine had diverged from that of the
mother country because it utilized many native ingredients. It had
also begun to be more elaborate because the society was becoming
more prosperous. Thus in keeping with the new interest in vegeta-
bles documented by culinary historians, for example, Simmons gives
recipes for more than a dozen different varieties, including artichokes
as well as beans and peas. Several recipes called for that quintessen-
tially American ingredient, Indian meal. Writing in an American
vernacular, she included recipes for Indian pudding, johnnycake,
slapjacks, pumpkin pie, and cranberry sauce. She employed the terms
"cooky" and "slaw," borrowed from the Dutch. In the second edition
of her work, published in 1800, she not only gave recipes for Election
Cake, Independence Cake, and Federal Pan Cake, but also for "rye
'n injun," the first appearance of this bread in a published cookbook.
In short, during the first decade of the new nation's existence, the
first published cookbook based on a distinctive American cuisine ap-
peared, and it reflected not only a more varied diet than had obtained
earlier but also a patriotic impulse in ingredients, language, types of
recipes, and names of dishes.12
It is worth pointing out that contrary to a hardy myth about the
inexactness of measurement before the twentieth century, perhaps
originally concocted by the home economists, the recipes in Ameri-
can Cookery are by and large neither slapdash nor haphazard. Exact
quantities of most ingredients other than spices are specified; for ex-
ample, the recipe for flour pudding calls for seven eggs, one-fourth
pound of sugar, and a teaspoon of salt. Ironically, this book, which
both borrowed from English sources and codified the preparation of
characteristic American dishes, foreshadowed the de-skilling trends
of the future in its utilization of chemical leavening as an ingredient
in cookies. According to Mary Tolford Wilson in her introduction to
the 1958 facsimile edition, this was the first time in the Anglo-Amer-
ican world that a published recipe called for chemical leavening, in
this case pearlash, a derivative of potash. Throughout most of the
nineteenth century, cookbooks would reflect a tension between the
old style of using eggs for leavening and the new, which permitted
the use of cheaper ingredients and required less skill on the part of
the baker.
If the colonial home had been viewed as mundane and lacking
vital connections to the realm of historical development, it had also
received relatively little notice for its role in people's emotional lives.
This was because patriarchal patterns of authority discouraged inter-
est in maternal nurture and the emotional warmth to be found at
home. Yet by the 18305, the home had begun to be sentimentalized
to an unprecedented degree. It is difficult to pinpoint the timing of
this change with precision because there was no clearly identifiable
event such as the American Revolution that precipitated the change.
Nonetheless we can point to the culmination of a number of long-
term trends operating in the Anglo-American world to explain this
phenomenon. In the first place childhood began to garner more at-
tention. In a provocative interpretation of the culture of late eigh-
teenth-century America, Jay Fliegelman argues that John Locke's
Education was "perhaps the most significant text of the Anglo-Amer-
ican Enlightenment" because it taught people to place a new value
on nurture and to esteem a consensual rather than authoritarian style
of parenting.13 Locke's empiricism, with its view of the human mind
as a tabula rasa at birth, implicitly made the affectionate home the
molder of intelligence as well as character. Only a fully affectionate
home would be able to produce the desired results. Such late eigh-
teenth-century works as Clarissa by Samuel Richardson and La Nou-
velle Heloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau taught educated Americans
to condemn parental tyranny.
If the highest duty of loving parents was to create an affectionate
home so as to provide optimal nurture for their children, so, too,
scholars have discerned a new pattern for marriage coming into being
at about the same time. Carl Degler dates the emergence of the
modern American family, characterized by "companionate" norms
for marriage, as occurring between the American Revolution and
about 1830." Echoing the findings of Lawrence Stone writing about
eighteenth-century England,15 Degler argues that the importance of
emotion was fundamental in creating new expectations for marriage.
The relationship became more egalitarian and was based on mutual
10 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
esteem and respect rather than on family property considerations.

Young people gained greater autonomy in choosing a marriage part-
ner. Above all, "The woman in the marriage enjoyed an increasing
degree of influence or autonomy within the family."18
The combination of the new value placed on nurture, the new
style of marriage, and changes in the material world—to be discussed
shortly—all coalesced to create a new style of motherhood. This style
was much more intense and demanded more of the mother emotion-
ally than was required in previous generations. On this topic alone
books can be—and have been—written.17 With this added emotional
charge, rather than being defined matter-of-factly as the place to eat
and sleep, home began to acquire such sentimental overtones that it
could inspire outbursts of rhapsody, especially after the changes in
American society ushered in during the 18305.
Turmoil and instability in the Jacksonian Age of the 18305 pene-
trated into a wide range of institutions and created great concern
about social cohesion. Universal white manhood suffrage meant that
class deference was no longer a political norm, although racial and
gender inequities remained. The cultural hegemony that had been
enjoyed by the clergy of a few denominations was being undermined
by the proliferation of new denominations and the destruction of the
last vestiges of an established church. Mass immigration was begin-
ning to create a more heterogeneous population. Given this, the
growing cities were becoming increasingly disorderly. People were
moving farther west and thus placing more distance between them-
selves and the historic guardians of cultural stability in the older cen-
ters of population. Factories were appearing on the landscape. Above
all, the cash nexus was at the base of an increasing number of human
relationships outside the family. Not surprisingly, the home came
to be seen as an especially potent symbol of integration at this time,
valuable because it seemed to represent a haven of stability.
The home's capacity to play this heightened emotional role was
enhanced by changes in the material underpinnings of domesticity
that had come to full fruition by the Age of Jackson. In essence, the
changes added up to the following: middle-class women had both
THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW IDEOLOGY 1I
more time and a greater profusion of utensils and other artifacts with
which to create the good home. In turn, novels, advice books, and
periodicals all began to reflect a highly positive image of the "notable
housewife" in action. By the 18505 there was an entire genre of "do-
mestic novel," written by, about, and for women, that depicted hero-
ines demonstrating remarkable initiative in creating homes. In sum,
the home gained a role both in women's lives and in their reading
matter as an arena for the display of prowess.
That nineteenth-century American women had more time for
tasks that were ornamental or ceremonial than had their colonial
counterparts was because an increasing percentage of families lived
in cities or towns by 1830, and the trend continued throughout the
century. This transition in itself eliminated many onerous tasks, for
urban women could now purchase a number of basic commodities
that had previously been produced at home, commodities that were
commercially available because of the beginnings of industrialization,
the other major source of change for women. A number of historians
have demonstrated what it meant for women's lives when women
were no longer required to spend a vast amount of time producing
cloth, for example. Although this was the most important develop-
ment, there were other items, too, like soap, that could be purchased
by the mid-nineteenth century—at a considerable savings of time to
the housewife.
Her time was also more abundant because of the increasing avail-
ability of domestic servants by the 18305 and because of changing
attitudes about the allocation of tasks between mistress and maid. In
essence, there began to be more social distance between the two and
a greater differentiation in the tasks they performed. Says Faye
Dudden in her recent book, Serving Women:
Beginning in the 18205 and more noticeably in the 18305,
Americans began to hire more servants to work in an explicitly
domestic sphere. Abandoning the language of help, they began
to call them "domestic servants" or just "domestics." The dif-
ference was more than semantic; it reflected altered relation-
ships. . . .18
12 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
Dudden argues that this change enabled middle-class women to de-

vote time to "the elaboration of domestic space and rituals." More-
over, supervising a servant—as opposed to working with help—gave
housewives a more elevated status. "In hiring domestics middle-class
women found the means to make domesticity more flexible, accom-
modating roles of authority and activity, rather than passivity and
isolation."19
Furthermore, all the evidence indicates a striking growth in the
variety and complexity of household objects and utensils for the
middle-class housewife by the 18305. The second quarter of the nine-
teenth century was a time of explosive economic growth, and the ma-
terial culture of ordinary households began to reflect the new abun-
dance. Even in fairly remote areas, a woman might have been able
proudly to display a China tea set.20 In the cities the possibilities for
acquiring such objects were much greater. In Philadelphia in 1850,
for example, a hardware store offered its customers two hundred and
fifty kitchen tools.21 Presumably, these tools could give the woman
in charge of the household an enhanced sense of craft and mastery.
What we know with certainty is that women clung to their familiar
household objects with determination as they packed for the Over-
land Trail, and they parted with them only with the greatest re-
luctance.22
Another technological change that had profound consequences for
the style of domesticity was the development of the stove. The transi-
tion from open-hearth cookery to cook stove was effected in the middle
decades of the nineteenth century. In her Treatise on Domestic
Economy of 1841, for example, Catharine Beecher gave instructions
for the hearth, while in The American Woman's Home, published
in 1869, she and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe discussed the
stove.23 Affordable for almost all American households, the cast-iron
stove made it easy to carry on several different cooking operations
simultaneously—a feat much more difficult to accomplish over an
open hearth—and thus contributed to a more varied menu in non-
elite households. In short, the stove led to the demise of the one-pot
meal.24
Dudden's argument and our growing understanding of material

culture accord well with what we know about changes in cookery
and needlework in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In
both these areas, available evidence indicates that a greater number
of women outside the elite class participated in producing more elab-
orate concoctions—whether in the kitchen or with a needle—than ever
before. Not surprisingly, given the technological changes, the eco-
nomic growth and the increasing urbanization, there was a prolifera-
tion of cookbooks in this period. As we have seen, Amelia Simmons's
American Cookery had codified the preparation of a number of
characteristic American dishes and had embodied a careful approach
to ingredients and measurement. What it did not have, however, was
a venturesome attitude toward anything exotic. "Garlicks, tho' used
by the French, are better adapted to the uses of medicine than cook-
ery," Simmons observed, for example.25 Conversely, many of the
cookbooks of the second quarter of the nineteenth century contained
recipes calling for such items as garlic, artichoke bottoms, and curry
powder.26 They also called for lavish ingredients in baking. Later in
the century, the cuisine was to deteriorate as chemical leavenings
came into greater use, cheap sugar made its appearance and was
widely utilized, and factory-made flour replaced stone-ground flour
on the housewife's shelf.27
For most of the nineteenth century, Eliza Leslie's The Lady's Re-
ceipt Book was the best-selling cookbook in the United States.28
Leslie included a recipe for temperance plum pudding, but in many
other instances she gave recipes calling for wine and brandy. In other
words, she took a far-from-abstemious approach to gastronomy. An
even livelier palate was encouraged in The Virginia Housewife by
Mary Randolph.29 Randolph gave a recipe for fish chowder with
two cups of white wine, for example, and also one for gazpacho, the
cold vegetable soup that is a classic of Spanish cuisine. The House-
keeper's Book of 1838 discussed a "mode of dressing cauliflowers
with Parmesan cheese."80 Other antebellum cookbooks included rec-
ipes for sauce Italian (with mushrooms, bay leaf, onion, and white
wine) and sauce piquante. Finally, the sumptuousness of some cakes
14 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
in the days before baking powder is indicated by a recipe for white

cake that calls for the whites of twenty eggs, one pound of butter, one
pound of flour, one pound of loaf sugar, and one pound of blanched
almonds crushed fine.31
There is reason to believe that baking was the nineteenth-century
housewife's particular pride. Said one antebellum writer, "There is
nothing in any department of cooking that gives more satisfaction to
a young housekeeper than to have accomplished what is called a
good baking."32 There were probably several reasons for this phe-
nomenon. In the first place, a housewife with adequate help might
turn over the day-in and day-out preparation of meals to a cook and
reserve the baking for special occasions to herself. In the second place,
baking called for more skill than any other department of cookery.
Heating an oven so that it would be uniformly hot was a very delicate
undertaking. Manufacturing one's own yeast for bread required great
skill. Beating eggs so that they would have enough volume to support
the other ingredients in a cake, especially with the mammoth pro-
portions of those days, was no easy task. In short, every step of the
baking process required an apprenticeship and a great deal of prac-
tice before the housewife could expect to be an accomplished baker.
Thus the inchoate developments of the early nineteenth century
became well-established realities by mid-century. More time, better
equipment, more abundant ingredients, and more widely available
cookbooks gave middle-class women the opportunity to approach
cookery in a wholly new spirit. As Mary Ryan writes in Cradle of the
Middle Class, by the 18505 "[t]he universal function of cooking . . .
had become something more than simply preparing food for human
consumption. Even publications addressed to farm women contained
increasingly elaborate recipes for cakes and cookies and desserts, all
recommended as symbols of domesticity as well as for their nutri-
tional value."33 Women treasured this expertise, and domestic writers
took very seriously the matter of how it might be transferred from
mother to daughter.
It was just this sense of an inherited craft tradition that many
novelists celebrated. Harriet Beecher Stowe gave a vivid account of
the preparations for a New England Thanksgiving in Oldtown Folks,

for example:
We also felt its approach in all departments of the household,—
the conversation at this time beginning to turn on high and
solemn culinary mysteries and receipts of wondrous power and
virtue. New modes of elaborating squash pies and quince tarts
were now ofttimes carefully discussed at the evening fireside
by Aunt Lois and Aunt Keziah, and notes seriously compared
with the experiences of certain other Aunties of high repute in
such matters. I noticed that on these occasions their voices often
fell into mysterious whispers, and that receipts of especial power
and sanctity were often communicated in tones so low as en-
tirely to escape the vulgar ear.34
There is a gentle humor in this passage but also genuine respect for
the collective wisdom of the "aunties."
Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World provides a valuable
source for studying attitudes toward a female craft tradition in house-
wifery both because it was so popular—published in late 1850, it
may have been the first novel to sell one million copies—and because
it contains a complex sub-theme with respect to domesticity. The
young heroine, Ellen Montgomery, loses her mother, a mother who
never kept house herself, and goes to live with her aunt, Miss For-
tune. Aunt Fortune, the character with the greatest proficiency at
housewifery, is not especially sympathetic. Indeed, she treats her
motherless niece with great severity. Nonetheless, Aunt Fortune
knows her way around a kitchen. The first breakfast Ellen eats after
arriving at her aunt's farm sets the tone. Ellen is awakened by the
smells and sounds of someone frying at the hearth. Going downstairs
she sees her aunt, "crouching by the pan turning her slices of pork."
In a few minutes the pan was removed from the fire, and Miss
Fortune went on to take out the brown slices of nicely fried
pork and arrange them in a deep dish, leaving a small quantity
of clear fat in the pan. Ellen, who was greatly interested, and
observing every step most attentively, settled in her own mind
that this would be thrown away. . . ,35
16 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
But instead she sees her aunt make gravy, pouring cream into the
pan and then "a fine white shower of flour." Soon the mixture has
been transformed "as if by magic to a thick white froth."
Despite her aunt's harshness, Ellen cannot resist being fascinated
by so much dazzling prowess. Happily for Ellen, there are other
women characters she can observe in the performance of domestic
duties without the risk attendant on observation of her aunt, a risk
occasioned by her aunt's sharp tongue and imperious demands. She
watches her surrogate mother, Alice Humphreys, make tea cakes, for
example, and also watches a kindly neighbor, Mrs. Van Brunt, in
action. Mrs. Van Brunt serves her "splitters," "a kind of rich short-
cake baked in irons, very thin and crisp, and then split in two and
buttered, whence their name."38
Thus, in addition to the narrative tension created by the unfolding
of melodramatic events in this novel—which some scholars claim to
have inaugurated the very concept of "best-seller"—there is an under-
lying tension created as the reader wonders how many trials Ellen
will undergo before she learns the housewifely arts. Even mundane
physical details are important. Ellen expresses repugnance about
cleaning up after other people:
"Look here," said Miss Fortune,—"don't you let me hear no

more of that, or I vow I'll give you something to do you won't
like. Now put the spoons here, and the knives and forks to-
gether here; and carry the salt-cellar and the pepper-box and
the butter and the sugar into the buttery."
"I don't know where to put them," said Ellen.
"Come along then, and I'll show you; it's time you did."
. . . This was Ellen's first introduction to the buttery; she had

never dared to go in there before. It was a long light closet or
pantry, lined on the left side, and at the further end, with wide
shelves up to the ceiling. On these shelves stood many capa-
cious pans and basins, of tin and earthen ware, filled with milk
and most of them coated with superb yellow cream.37
In the end there is no satisfactory resolution to the issue of how

Ellen will be inducted into the female craft tradition because the
THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW IDEOLOGY IJ
young heroine is whisked off to an aristocratic never-never land in

Scotland where she has a whole new set of problems. Nonetheless, it
is not hard to imagine that one of the reasons for the book's unprec-
edented success was the fact that hundreds of thousands of Ameri-
can women were fascinated by Ellen's pre-Scotland plight: her aunt
extracts a high price for the domestic apprenticeship; Alice dies, as
had Ellen's beloved if unskilled mother, and Mrs. Van Brunt comes
from too different a social class to replace Alice.38
It is important to juxtapose the cookbooks with the novels because
taken together they give us a sense of a craft tradition not only as it
was practiced but as it was savored by its practitioners. Moreover, if
we juxtapose surviving nineteenth-century needlework with nine-
teenth-century women's magazines we can glimpse a similar phe-
nomenon. In her beautifully illustrated history of American needle-
work, Susan Swan argues that by mid-century, middle-class women
had more time than ever before for fancy work, with the result that
they became "zealous needleworkers." They were aided by the fact
that widely circulating magazines like Godey's Lady's Book published
needlework patterns and instructions, thus disseminating skilled tech-
niques beyond an elite. Women could do the needlework and also
see their effort validated in a respected national publication.39 They
could aspire to perfect their skills.
That changes in the material foundations of domesticity turned the
middle-class house into a home contributed to strengthening the emo-
tional role that could be played by the domestic sphere. The newly
potent emotional content of "home" in turn created a religious func-
tion for the domestic sphere, one celebrated by the leading Protestant
spokespeople of the mid-nineteenth century. In order to understand
how home came to be viewed in so transcendent a fashion, however,
we need to undertake a brief survey of the changes that had taken
place in American Protestantism by 1850.
In its seventeenth-century manifestation, Calvinism—the dominant
strand in the colonial religious fabric—was rigorous, demanding, and
patriarchal both in theology and in governance. In Calvinist thought,
God the Father predestined some to be saved and more to be damned.
The fearful sinner could hope for enough signs of divine grace to
18 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
enable him or her to live a godly life, as, in fact, a "visible saint."
But underneath there was bound to be a powerful anxiety because
the sermons one heard every Sunday emphasized human shortcom-
ings and depravity. If God the Father was merciful but just in His
infinite wisdom, so too should His earthly representative in the com-
munity, the clergyman, be merciful but just. For women the pre-
scribed role was to accept clerical authority with meek submission,
as they accepted the authority of their husbands within the family.40
By the nineteenth century, there had been dramatic changes. The
Great Awakening of the eighteenth century had destroyed the unity
of Calvinism. This, in turn, undermined the authority of the clergy
in the established churches. Human agency began to assume a
greater role in theology, too. In fact, by the nineteenth century,
mainstream Protestants accepted a view of the individual's capacity
to take an active role in his or her own salvation that would have
been heresy in the seventeenth century. At the same time, the eigh-
teenth century had also seen an increasingly rational approach to
religion gaining acceptance. Deism, a view of God as the clockmaker
who started the universe in motion but who is remote from daily
lives, was espoused by many Americans, the most prominent being
Thomas Jefferson.
A leading scholar of American evangelical religion, William Mc-
Loughlin, divides the nineteenth century into the following periods.
Between 1800 and 1835 there was a counter-revolution against deism
but with much of the bite of seventeenth-century Calvinism gone.
Charles Grandison Finney, exponent of the possibilities for human
perfectibility, was one of the leading preachers of the day. Another
important figure was Lyman Beecher, "a major transitional figure in
the adjustment of the churches from the established religion of the
colonial period to the new era of voluntarism and denominational
competition." The second period, between 1835 and 1875, McLough-
lin calls Romantic Evangelicalism. The two leading figures were
Horace Bushnell and Henry Ward Beecher. After 1875, liberal
Evangelicals began to espouse the Social Gospel.41
Thus Romantic Evangelicalism was at its height during the exact
period when domesticity enjoyed its greatest esteem. Clearly, this
THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW IDEOLOGY ip
was no coincidence, because what Bushnell and Beecher, among

others, did was to create a religious role for the home that made it an
even more important institution. The leading theologian of his day,
Horace Bushnell presented a view of the importance of nurture in
which such vast claims were made for the role of Christian parents
in inculcating piety that the home virtually replaced the cross as the
central Christian symbol. Reacting to the revivals that flourished in
the Age of Jackson, with their heavy emphasis on a single act of con-
version, Bushnell set out to describe an alternative route to salvation.
Building on the foundation of Scottish common sense philosophy—
the Scottish thinkers had placed great stress on cultivating the moral
capacity—he offered a "genial reconstruction of theology" in which
the child became a "center of hope."42 According to Bushnell, chil-
dren should begin to learn about Christ in their early years, but their
instruction should be very different from that of an adult. He thought
that Christ should be "infused into the childish mind; in other words,
that the house, having a domestic spirit of grace dwelling in it, should
become the church of childhood, the table and hearth a holy rite and
life an element of saving power."43 Indeed, home and religion are
inextricably intertwined in Bushnell's view: "Home and religion are
kindred words: names both of love and reverence; home because it
is the seat of religion; religion because it is the sacred element of
home."44
If Horace Bushnell was the most famous American theologian,
Henry Ward Beecher was the most famous clergyman during the
middle decades of the nineteenth century. Like Bushnell, Beecher
espoused a romantic, Christ-centered theology. Like Bushnell, he,
too, placed great emphasis on the role of the Christian home. One
difference between them lay in the fact that Beecher tended to stress
the conjugal relationship rather than the nurture of children. Many
nineteenth-century Protestants saw love as the essence of spiritual
life, and this led directly to seeing marriage as a "holy sacrament" for
the enjoyment of divine grace.45 There are numerous passages in
Beecher's writings that exemplify this phenomenon, but his novel,
Norwood (1867), exemplifies it best. When one of the characters
becomes engaged, for example, Beecher's narrator remarks: "From
20 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
the hour of his engagement, Cathcart was a different man. Every

faculty was quickened, but most, his moral nature." After marriage,
"[h]e worshipped Rachel with love; he came to her as one comes to
an altar or shrine."46 Describing the home of another set of charac-
ters, the narrator says:
But stop. Turn back. We have neglected the heart of home,

the mother's room! The old temple had no such holy of holies.
The mother's room! Here came she a bride. Here only God's
angels and her own husband have heard what words the in-
most heart of love can coin.47
It is useful to compare the approach of Bushnell and Beecher with

that of the seventeenth-century Puritan Cotton Mather. Like nine-
teenth-century writers, Mather believed that children should receive
instruction in a Christian home. In his diary, he left a detailed de-
scription of his own practice of family education. More than one
hundred years before the heyday of domesticity, the approach was
unabashedly patriarchal: "I first beget in them a high opinion of
their father's love to them, and of his being best able to judge what
shall be good for them."48 This is in decided contrast to Beecher's
view of the mother's room as the "holy of holies." In the mid-
nineteenth century mothers, not fathers, were the moral arbiters.
Very different from evangelical Protestantism was Unitarianism,
a liberal creed that emerged in New England in the early nineteenth
century and emphasized "the goodness of God and the dignity of
man," while de-emphasizing the divinity of Christ. Indeed, there
were a series of bitter battles between clergy of the two persuasions
in the early iSoos.49 What the two had in common, however—and
this indicates how pervasive the cult of domesticity was in American
culture—was agreement on the value of home and the importance of
mother. Theodore Parker, a leading Unitarian clergyman in the
antebellum period (and a militant abolitionist) dilated on these sub-
jects in more than one sermon. "Home is the dearest spot in the
world," Parker maintained, and mother, "the dearest name that mor-
tal lips can ever speak." Indeed, we know God through our mothers.
"Her conscience went before us as a great wakening light. . . . " A
motherly woman can even educate her husband, he asserted.60 Thus

we see that by the antebellum years, for both evangelical and liberal
Protestants, home had acquired a transcendence that it had lacked in
the eighteenth century.
Not surprisingly, the new valorization of "home," "mother," and
"wife" had profound consequences for American women. With home
seen as the front line of action to produce virtuous citizens, women
would need adequate training for their new tasks. More than one
scholar has demonstrated how significant the ideology of Republican
Motherhood was in promoting better education for women.51 In the
words of Benjamin Rush:
I beg pardon for having delayed so long to say any thing of the
separate and peculiar mode of education proper for women in
a republic. I am sensible that they must concur in all our plans
of education for young men . . . they should not only be in-
structed in the usual branches of female education, but they
should also be taught the principles of liberty and government;
and the obligations of patriotism should be inculcated upon
them. The opinions and conduct of men are often regulated by
the women in the most arduous enterprizes of life; and their
approbation is frequently the principal reward of the hero's
dangers, and the patriot's toils. Besides, the first impressions
upon the mind of children are generally derived from the
women. Of how much consequence, therefore, is it in a repub-
lic that they should think justly upon the great subject of lib-
erty and government.52
So many Americans agreed with Rush that by 1860 there was little
discernible difference in the literacy rates of the two sexes. What is
more, girls were just about as likely to be found in school as boys.53
All of this represented a sharp break with the colonial past.
The growing number of educated, urban women created a market
for advice books and novels—as well as for cookbooks—and both of
these genres then reflected the new possibilities for female self-
esteem available by the antebellum period. We have already exam-
ined The Wide, Wide World in some detail. Susan Warner's "best-
seller" was part of a veritable flood of domestic novels in the 18505,
22 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
many of them setting forth extremely positive views of the housewife.

For decades these novels have been ignored, patronized, or dismissed
with contempt.34 Now both the novels and their authors are being
placed under the historical scrutiny they deserve, considering their
enormous popularity.55
What is most striking about the novels when one reads a number
of them at a time is the fact that, by and large, marriage is rarely de-
picted as the solution to a woman's problems. Rather, the heroine has
to learn to develop her own resources and to display pluck in order
to keep body and soul together. In many instances, she becomes a
professional writer. In one clearly autobiographical novel, Fanny
Fern's Ruth Hall, the widowed heroine is reduced to doing laundry
before she discovers her writing talent and goes on to fame and for-
tune. The heroine of E. D. E. N. Southworth's The Deserted Wife
becomes a professional singer, and with her income restores her an-
cestral home and gets her husband back on her own terms. Still un-
able to read about other women's activities in newspapers or history
books, women could now read novels that depicted such activities-
activities beyond what appertained merely to the realm of romance,
and that often gave minute character analyses of their female pro-
tagonists. This phenomenon, in turn, validated female experience in
a wholly unprecedented way.
Like the novels, the advice books presented a highly positive view
of the housewife's role. One can, in fact, discern a strengthening of
this tendency within a very short period of time. We begin with
Domestic Duties by Frances Parkes. Originally published in England,
the third edition was revised for the American market and published
in the United States in 1829. Parkes claimed unequivocally: "The
world corrupts; home should refine. . . ,"56 The self-interestedness
fostered by the former injures the mind, tarnishing it with "a rust
which nothing can better remove than home, when it is properly
organized. . . ." She thought that because contemporary women
were better educated than hitherto, they enjoyed an esteem that
produced greater delicacy of conduct by men and would lead to the
decay of such customs as the post-dinner segregation of the sexes. In
these regards, she was a woman of her time and even prescient about
the future. In other ways, however, the book looked backward to the
eighteenth century. Parkes denounced the new practice of "shop-
ping" as a "fashionable method of killing time," which was unfair
to the shopkeepers.57 Further, she thought that woman's employments
in the home, however useful, did not challenge the mind as did male
employments. At its height many exponents of the cult of domesticity
would present an altogether different argument, claiming that a
housewife might well benefit from an understanding of the princi-
ples of chemistry, for example, to say nothing of the depth of moral
and religious training she needed. Parkes's book is valuable in that
she presents an inchoate vision of what others would later develop
more fully and state more forcefully.
Another early writer on domesticity was the feminist-abolitionist,
Lydia Maria Child. Because she engaged in a voluminous corre-
spondence, which has been preserved and even indexed, we are for-
tunate enough to be able to juxtapose her prescriptions for "the
American Frugal Housewife" with her descriptions of her own house-
wifely experiences. Students of Child's life have pointed out that
Child's marriage to a man who tended to be improvident meant that
she had less domestic help than was usual for a middle-class woman.58
What is more, she and David Child spent several years living apart,
evidently for financial reasons. Therefore her close study of the best
way to achieve frugality, reflected in her popular advice book of
1829, was no affectation.
Child wrote The American Frugal Housewife during the first year
of her marriage, and from then until the end of her long life she
wrote and published almost constantly. Her letters reflect the strain
of carrying the "double burden" of heavy domestic responsibilities
and writing—writing not as an avocation but in order to support her-
self and her husband. One of the chief publicists for the cult of
domesticity, she often expressed the longing for a chance to enjoy a
home herself in a more unqualified way. For example, after twenty
years of marriage, she wrote to her husband, "Oh, if we only could
have ever so small a home, where you could be contented and have
no dreams about Congress!"69 In a letter to her mother-in-law written
eighteen years earlier, she had mentioned their "pecuniary troubles"
24 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
and had exclaimed, "Sometimes I get a little fidgety because I want

to go to housekeeping so much—and it is such a long, long way out
of the woods yet."80 Letters to friends, written in the intervals when
she actually had the responsibility for a home, frequently enumerated
a set of extremely arduous chores, including, in addition to cooking,
sewing, and washing, such items as mending rat-gnawed meal bags,
whitewashing the house, and mending old carpets. At one point she
wrote, "I often think if we could graze in the fields, like the cows,
and have a pretty feathered suit for our life-time, like the dear little
birds, it would be vastly convenient."61
The American Frugal Housewife reflects a practical, no-nonsense
tone. Every object and process in the home should be studied for
ways to save either time or money, Child suggests. Girls as young as
six can begin to contribute to the household economy by braiding
straw for their own bonnets. "Economical people will seldom use
preserves, except for sickness. They are unhealthy, expensive, and
useless to those who are well."82 She gives no recipe for pound cake,
stating that "cup cake is about as good as pound cake, and is cheaper."
On the other hand, "There is a kind of tea cake still cheaper."63 In
addition to the recipes there is advice on everything, from how to get
rid of warts to how to get rid of red ants.
Like Domestic Duties, Child's book contains elements of both old
and new. In its practical tone and unsentimental approach to advice
giving, The American Frugal Housewife resembles a latter-day Poor
Richard's Almanac. At one point Child even quoted one of Dr.
Franklin's maxims: "Nothing is cheap that we do not want."64 Yet
in her view of the importance of a good education for women she
was articulating one of the tenets of the new style of domesticity and
anticipating arguments that Catharine Beecher would present more
systematically a dozen or so years later: "There is no subject so much
connected with individual happiness and national prosperity as the
education of daughters." Girls require a sound domestic education,
however, so that they can cultivate their own happiness and that of
others: "The difficulty is, education does not usually point the female
heart to its only true resting-place. That dear English word home is
not half so powerful a talisman as the world. Instead of the salutary
truth, that happiness is in duty, they are taught to consider the two
things totally distinct; and that whoever seeks one, must sacrifice the
other."85
Catharine Sedgwick's novel, Home, published in 1835, provides a
particularly valuable source for examining the characteristics of the
early cult of domesticity because its tone is so didactic as to reveal
clearly the author's own views. In a work possessing little literary
merit but evidently resonating in the minds of Jacksonian Americans,
Sedgwick chronicled the fortunes of the Barclay family, with an eye
to providing precise details about an exemplary home. She describes
the food, conversation, and interaction at the Barclay dinner table
and then sets a parallel scene in a chaotic household so that her
readers can learn what to do and what not to do. Mr. and Mrs.
Barclay regard meals as three opportunities a day for teaching "punc-
tuality, order, neatness, temperance, self-denial, kindness, generosity,
and hospitality." The food may be frugal, but the table is set with
"scrupulous neatness."66 Meals proceed at a deliberate pace so that
Mr. Barclay may instruct along the way. Boldly asserting the value
of good works as well as church attendance—the Barclays go to public
worship on Sunday mornings and engage in charitable activities in
the afternoon—Sedgwick also describes the way both husband and
wife spend time on the Sabbath inculcating Irish immigrants with
American values. Mrs. Barclay says that while her husband gives
instruction in the responsibilities of citizenship, "I take upon myself
the more humble, womanly task of directing their domestic affec-
tions and instructing them, as well as I am able, in their everyday
home duties."67 Again we see an intermingling of old and new, with
Mr. Barclay viewed in rather patriarchal a light, relative to the litera-
ture of mid-century.
Although she, too, published domestic advice in the 18305, the
Hartford poet Lydia Sigourney represents a somewhat later stage in
the evolution of the cult of domesticity. Rather than conceding that
household duties call forth only a limited range of abilities, she
asserts, "The science of housekeeping affords exercise for the judg-
ment and energy, ready recollection and patient self-possession that
are the characteristics of a superior mind."88 In particular, "Cookery
26 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
it is surely the business of the mistress of a family either to do, or to

see well done. . . . Neither is it a despicable discipline of the
mind. Its details are almost endless. . . ,"89 While deprecating the
idea that women might share in the actual administration of govern-
ment, she clearly believes in the value of Republican Mothers: "The
aid of the weaker vessel is now invoked by legislators and sages. It
has been discovered that there are signs of disease in the body poli-
tick, which can best be allayed, by the subordination taught in fam-
ilies and through her agency to whom is committed the moulding of
the whole mass of mind in its first formation."70 Indeed, she advances
a specifically historical generalization to validate the role of the Re-
publican Mother: "It has been remarked that almost all illustrious men
have been distinguished by love for their mother."71
In yet another way did Sigourney foreshadow themes that would
be set forth in the 18405 and 18505: "Homes should be the centre
but not the boundary of our duties; the focus of sympathy, but not
the point where it terminates. The action of the social feelings is
essential to a well-balanced character. Morbid diseases are generated
by an isolated life. . . ,"72 In other words, there is no antithesis be-
tween concern for one's home and concern for one's society. The
world outside the home is more than a source of danger to be avoided
or a corrupting influence; it should properly be the recipient of
charitable energies that spill over from one's home life.
As for the attitudes of male writers toward domesticity, the exami-
nation of how leading male intellectuals felt toward the home be-
longs to the next chapter, on the epic stage of domesticity. In looking
at the emergence of the new ideology, it is important to note, how-
ever, that early on there were men who gave advice about the home
to other men. The type of advice they gave explains, in part, how
the cult could empower women. That is, the fact that middle-class
men were being told to respect the domestic sphere and to subor-
dinate some portion of self in order to achieve the optimum home
makes comprehensible the leverage that gave women more influ-
ence—at least potentially—in their own households than had been
the case in the colonial period.
One of the most prolific dispensers of advice was William Andrus
Alcott. A physician and the author of some thirty books and pam-
phlets, Alcott wrote for the young husband as well as for the young
wife. Achieving a happy Christian home was the supreme felicity
for both sexes, he thought. "I have seen bliss begun below. . . . I
have known a husband who regarded home, not as a prison—a place
of irksome restraint—and its inmates fellow-prisoners, but as a scene
of the highest delight."73 While he ascribed the preponderance of
authority in making decisions to husbands, he thought that marriage
should be a "school" for both parties. Husbands owed consideration
to their wives; for example, they should be careful about bringing
dirt into the house. Alcott thought that, in general, husbands did not
render enough help to their wives.
Another prolific writer of the Victorian period, Timothy Shay
Arthur, author of Ten Nights in a Barroom, among other novels,
gave the ideology of Republican Motherhood an unusual twist in his
advice to young men. If writers of the early Republic had urged that
women be well educated so that they could train good citizens,
thereby giving the home an expressly political function, Arthur went
so far as to argue that no man could be a good citizen unless he were
to have a good home:
Indeed, the more perfectly a man fulfills all his domestic duties,
the more perfectly in that very act, has he discharged his duty
to the whole . . . those who have least regard for home—who
have indeed, no home, no domestic circle—are the worst citi-
zens.74
Indeed, the domestic sphere was special for men as well as women.
"Home is man's true place."75
Home might be "man's true place," but most Americans probably
would have agreed with Henry Clarke Wright that, above all, it was
the "empire of the mother," to use the title of one of Wright's books.
Like Alcott and Arthur, Wright was an enormously popular writer
who extolled the value of the home. Like many of his contempo-
raries, such as Alcott, he believed that the best home was the purest
home, and that meant that sex should be for procreation only. Thus
we see another means by which the cult of domesticity gave women
28 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
leverage within families: Wright and others were counseling men

that it was so important that a mother's rule be respected that a hus-
band should learn to curb his sexual appetite in deference to her
presumed passionlessness. The man who thinks of marriage primarily
as a means to sensual gratification will never have a pure and happy
home, Wright asserted. Further:
The details of domestic economy can never be repulsive to the

true husband. On the contrary, to relieve the wants and cares
of the wife, in any way, and help her to bear the burdens of
household labor, is not to serve as a menial, but to cherish her
and to sustain her as a husband.78
The point in examining these three male authors is not to suggest

that their advice was invariably or literally followed. It is well known
that prescriptive literature cannot be taken as a description of social
reality. Moreover, the internal dynamics of any marriage, including
the distribution of power between husband and wife, will depend on
a number of factors such as the strength of personality of the two
people involved and the legal rights of both. But when a culture
enshrines the home and the moral authority of the mother to the
extent that American culture did in the mid-nineteenth century, a
wife has a rationale for advancing her claims.
We do have one body of evidence that suggests that the new pre-
scriptions affected behavior: the decreasing family size in the nine-
teenth century. Daniel Scott Smith coined the term "domestic
feminism"—which means, in essence, women using domestic creden-
tials to enhance their position in the family or in the society—in
order to account for the declining birth rate during that period from
an average of seven children per married white woman in 1800 to
an average of three and a half in 1900. He speculates that husbands,
newly respectful of their wives' autonomy, cooperated in the attempt
to have fewer children, an interpretation endorsed by Carl Degler.77
Nancy Cott has delineated the ideological means by which this re-
duction in family size may well have come about. According to the
tenets of the emerging cult of domesticity and in the view of writers
like Alcott and Wright, as we have discovered, women were seen as
lacking sexual passion—in contrast to earlier Protestant views of Eve

as a temptress—and therefore husbands were expected to keep their
sexual appetites under tight control.78 Whether sexual withholding
from their husbands may have exacted too high a price from the
women themselves is, of course, an important issue and one that
will no doubt be subject to scholarly debate.
That declining family size not only reflected the strength of the
cult of domesticity but also enhanced that strength as the century
wore on and the average family grew ever smaller in number must
be understood, too. In the colonial period, a woman spent the pre-
ponderance of her adult life pregnant, lactating, or with responsibility
for somewhat older children. This placed a heavy burden on her
health and energy. Moreover, a housewife's capacity to approach
domestic tasks as aesthetic activities was undercut by the burden of
her reproductive responsibilities to her family. An exhausted woman
needing to sew for a family of eight children, for example, could not
devote her time to fancy needlework or fancy baking. She also had
less time to read, whether advice books, cookbooks, or novels.
In discussing the formulation of the cult of domesticity, one wishes
to know how much impact the newly valorized role of the home had
on women's concepts of self. In truth, knowing the extent to which
the cult enhanced women's self-esteem would require the examina-
tion of a large number of surviving letters and diaries in order to ap-
proach an adequate answer. There are indications, though, that the
new value conferred on the home gave women a greater chance to
feel satisfied about doing important work than had been the case in
the eighteenth century.
One nineteenth-century woman whose diary reflected high self-
esteem about her performance as a housewife was Harriet Robinson.
The wife of an editor whose worldly success was never great, she
took considerable pride in being "a good poor man's wife." She knew
that her skills were essential to the family economy and thought that
it took "a woman of Genius" to be a good housewife and that cooking
was "one of the fine arts." Robinson sewed for her family and was
especially pleased with herself when she was able to recycle gar-
ments. One daughter's hooded red cape was cut down from an old
30 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
dress and dyed, for example. Her biographer, Claudia Bushman, has
this to say about Harriet Robinson: "Harriet was competent, maybe
even inspired in her job as housewife. She had mastered her calling
and could not help thinking well of herself."79 It should be noted
that she did have "daily" help with the heavier chores and that "her
major duties were managerial rather than manual."80
But even if the valorization of the home made it likely that domes-
ticity was an "adequate prop" for female self-esteem, we must not
quit our discussion of the emergence of the new values without ac-
knowledging how hard many women's lives still were in the nine-
teenth century. If we examine just one family—and that a family of
outspoken advocates of the cult of domesticity—we can gain insight
into the sheer onerousness of the housewife's job. Harriet Beecher
Stowe wrote the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century, Uncle
Tom's Cabin, but in addition she also wrote books and articles on
the good home and how to achieve it. No one wrote more feelingly
than she about the joy of nurturing young creatures (even plants).
Yet before she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin and became world-famous
and while she was in fact immersed in domesticity with a number of
young children to care for, she was much less positive about her own
tasks. In fact, Stowe may have suffered acutely from the disjunction
between the ideal of marriage and family life that she celebrated in
her novels and her own experience as a wife and mother. At one
point while her children were small, she took the water cure for
nearly a year, thus escaping from all domestic responsibilities and
also insuring that she would not become pregnant during this in-
terval. Shortly before she took the cure, she had written that she was
"sick of the smell of sour milk, and sour meat, and sour everything,
and then the clothes will not dry, and no wet thing does, and every-
thing smells mouldy; and altogether I feel as if I never wanted to
eat again."81
A member of one of the best-known families in the country, Stowe
nonetheless endured many of the problems that confronted other
women who were less well known. Her husband Calvin Stowe, a
clergyman and professor, had difficulty earning enough money to
support his family above the level of genteel poverty in the early
days of the marriage. Thus the family was unable to afford a level
of domestic help adequate to relieve Stowe's heavy burdens. She bore
several children within the space of a few years, including twin girls.
Her time was fragmented between the necessities of child care and
housework and the need to write in order to bring in extra money.
In her memoir of Stowe, Annie Fields describes an episode in which
another woman friend was urging the young writer to complete a
story. Stowe is said to have replied to the friend:
"But, my dear, here is a baby in my arms and two little pussies

by my side, and there is a great baking down in the kitchen,
and there is a 'new girl' for 'help,' besides preparations to be
made for housecleaning next week. It is really out of the ques-
tion, you see."82
While frequently complaining about being overburdened, Stowe

at least preserved her health. In this respect, she was more fortunate
than her sister-in-law, Eunice, wife of Henry Ward Beecher. Too
much work and too many pregnancies robbed Eunice Beecher of
both health and spirits, and she spent the last several decades of her
life as a sickly and querulous semi-invalid. Nonetheless she joined
her husband and sisters-in-law in writing domestic advice, All Around
the House; or How To Make Homes Happy.83
With such examples before her, Catharine Beecher, Stowe's sister
and author of the best-known treatises on domestic economy of the
nineteenth century, advanced sweeping generalizations about the ex-
tent of female invalidism in the United States. She first sounded the
warning in A Treatise on Domestic Economy. Young American girls
had delicate constitutions to begin with, she thought, and when they
had to deal with the "trials of domestic life," they were often inca-
pacitated.84 A dozen years later Beecher published Letters to the
People on Health and Happiness, in which she maintained that,
according to her personal study of dozens of communities, sick
women outnumbered the well by a three-to-one margin.85 In other
words, despite her warm advocacy of domesticity, she worried that
these responsibilities took a heavy toll on American women.
Those housewives who escaped overwork all too often did so at the
32, JUST A HOUSEWIFE
expense of other women, that is, by the exploitation of servants. As

the century wore on and there were increasing class differences be-
tween mistress and maid—and eventually ethnic and racial differ-
ences as well—women who worked as domestics were increasingly
likely to be excluded from the benefits of domesticity they provided
for others. In an earlier day, when housewives used "help" rather
than employing "servants," mistress and maid had worked side by
side, with the latter knowing that she could realistically aspire to
having a comfortable establishment of her own some day. Not so by
mid-century. Domestics were most often immigrants and part of the
working class for their entire lives. The extent to which working-class
families participated in the ideology of domesticity—or created their
own variant of the middle-class norm—is worth a book in itself. What
can be known with certainty is that a working-class woman was at
least as likely as Harriet Beecher Stowe or Eunice Beecher to be
overworked and overburdened, whether she was a domestic in some
one else's home or a married woman with a family of her own.88
Moreover, the ideal may well have outstripped the real with re-
spect to companionate marriage. Carl Degler and others have argued
that new, egalitarian norms for marriage became widely diffused in
the United States by about 1830, norms that both precipitated the
creation of the cult of domesticity and promoted its continuance. A
recent study by Suzanne Lebsock reminds us that, companionate
marriage notwithstanding, the law gave husbands by far the greater
share of power within a marriage in the antebellum years. In study-
ing the free women of Petersburg, Virginia, between 1784 and
1860, she was struck by the number of common-law disabilities that
encumbered married women. In addition, men did not often make
their wives the executors of their wills.87 It is useful to be reminded
that, while the culture reflected an image of the woman as moral
arbiter, until well into the nineteenth century the law gave men the
power of a patriarch. This was accomplished by the restrictions on
a married woman's property rights and also on her right to custody
of her own children in the event of a divorce.
It must also be acknowledged that the ideology of domesticity was
narrow in many ways, especially in its early phase. It had not only
been primarily generated by New England writers to reflect the con-

cerns of white, Anglo, middle-class women,88 but its exponents usually
made a series of invidious assumptions about women of other classes,
regions, and ethnic origins, to say nothing of other colors. The figure
of the New England housewife was singled out so often for special
mention that it is clear that she was becoming a stock character in
American literature as well as the standard of excellence in the
manuals. We find Sigourney, for example, warning that it is difficult
to combine being a truly excellent housekeeper with a literary career,
especially in New England.89 In other words, New England women
were assumed to have higher standards than women in the rest of
the country. In Home Sedgwick took it for granted that her readers
would share her frame of reference when she wrote about the way
Mrs. Barclay spent Sunday afternoons instructing Irish women in
"domestic affections" and "everyday home duties." When Irish im-
migrant women began to flock into domestic service there were re-
peated references in the advice literature to the tedium of teaching
"green Erin" the domestic graces. The assumption was that these
young women, coming from homes too poor to enjoy many comforts,
were ignorant of the very meaning of "home" as it was then being
apotheosized.
No doubt women in the more settled parts of the country had an
easier time creating homes—in the fullest sense of the word—than on
the frontier, although the evidence is accumulating to suggest that
"westering" women sought to recreate the same domestic sphere they
had left behind when they reached the new country.90 In her recent
book on southern women, Catharine Clinton suggests that plantation
mistresses had a much more tenuous hold on the cult of domesticity
than had their northern counterparts. This was because female virtue
in the South was still defined primarily in terms of chastity. A south-
ern woman might perform very onerous work, but the regional norm
defined her only as a lady (or not a lady) and not as a "frugal house-
wife."91 Thus the stock New England housewife might have had a
certain basis in reality, but there seems to be no empirical foundation
strong enough to justify the negative stereotypes of housewives out-
side the favored area and class that were so freely put forth.
34 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
Finally, although the cult of domesticity did not create an asym-

metrical gender system—as we have seen male and female tasks were
highly differentiated in the pre-industrial period, for example—it did
little or nothing to challenge the idea of sexual asymmetry. Valoriz-
ing home does not necessarily entail ascribing domestic tasks only
to women. In fact, at mid-century a few people were moving toward
the position that both sexes should share domestic tasks. But most
Americans tied a heightened appreciation of home to an ideology of
sex roles in which women were seen as by nature more gentle, more
loving, and more willing to sacrifice than men. What was new about
the cult was that, for the first time in American history, both home
and woman's special nature were seen as uniquely valuable.
Therefore, despite all the limitations and the gaps between the
ideal and the real, the cult of domesticity had a favorable impact on
women. Wherever a middle-class housewife turned—whether to her
minister's words from the pulpit or to her favorite reading matter-
she could see and hear her value and the value of the home for which
she was responsible being affirmed. Moreover, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, overworked and worn out as she may have felt herself to be
at some stages of her life, had an influence on American culture and
on the course of American history that no woman before had ever
enjoyed—and not many since. This influence came about because
Stowe used the moral authority of the housewife to justify speaking
out against slavery. The cult of domesticity was predicated in part
on the idea that the home has an expressly political function. The
political impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin, filled as it is with domestic
imagery, demonstrated how the influence of home on the world
could manifest itself.
TWO
The Golden Age of Domesticity
w HEN THE HOME acquired so diverse and expanded a set of

roles in the early nineteenth century—political, religious, emotional,
^
and social—it ceased to be automatically taken for granted by men.
Indeed, by 1850 the home had become a mainstay of the national
culture. Many scholars have discussed women's culture in the nine-
teenth century and have related it to the strength of the cult of
domesticity.1 What has been insufficiently recognized, however, is
the extent to which men, too, entered into the ideology of domes-
ticity, helping to create and perpetuate it. In so doing they took the
home beyond the boundaries of "woman's sphere" and into the na-
tional arena. Moreover, in so doing, they and the female exponents
of the cult created yet another role for the home, an epic one in
which the home provided a touchstone of values for reforming the
entire society. The epic style of domesticity then resonated in the
minds of middle-class women and impelled them to participate in
crusades outside the home. In fact, when the cult of domesticity
reached its height, middle-class women began to organize for exert-
ing influence in the world as never before and in such a way that
public and private values were genuinely intermingled rather than
being dichotomized. Hence the designation "Golden Age" for the
mid-nineteenth century.
35
36 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
Furthermore, the intermingling of public and domestic spheres in

turn created the possibility of establishing a symmetrical gender
system—although such was not to be the case for generations and is
still not fully realized. Eighteenth-century America had seen highly
differentiated spheres, with all glory and honor being accorded to
the public realm. The cult of domesticity created a new respect for
the private sphere, and when certain of its exponents, male and fe-
male, began to carry domestic values outside the home, they also
carried a rationale for private, "indoors" people—that is, women—to
be publicly active. This, then, solved the problem of how to mediate
between two spheres that were not only geographically distinct but
also populated by entirely different groups of people once industrial-
ization took male work away from the home.
This problem was well depicted in one of Lydia Maria Child's
short stories. In "Home and Politics," Child, whose own domestic
life was troubled and unhappy owing to the fecklessness of her hus-
band, delineated an unbridgeable gap between the realms of the two
sexes. The fictional husband, an enthusiast for Henry Clay, becomes
so absorbed in politics that he neglects his domestic responsibilities.
His wife eventually goes mad. Citing this story to demonstrate the
difficulty of reconciling home values and worldly values, Kirk Jeffrey
says, "Essentially, Mrs. Child is here wrestling with the same diffi-
culty: experience in the world inevitably changes a person, but the
cult of home demanded that one return absolutely intact."2 Yet as the
epic style of domesticity developed, this difficulty was addressed be-
cause women, too, began to speak out on public issues—in the name
of the home—while many men proclaimed the salience of domestic
values.
It was not just evangelical Christian men like Horace Bushnell
and Henry Ward Beecher who waxed eloquent about the home.
Indeed, we have already encountered some of Theodore Parker's
thoughts on the subject. But the most important male writer to deal
with the home was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was unquestionably
the most influential American thinker of his time. It is well known
that Emerson hoped to precipitate the creation of a unique American
culture with his book Nature. What has been ignored for decades
THE GOLDEN AGE OF DOMESTICITY 37
is the fact that he also gave thought to the moral foundations of the
just household in a democratic society. This is not to say that domes-
ticity was a major component of his work. Nonetheless, what he
wrote about the home in the essay "Domestic Life" was striking and
original.
In the first place, he advocated a distribution of household tasks
that would reflect democratic values:
I think it plain that this voice of communities and ages, "Give

us wealth, and the good household shall exist," is vicious, and
leaves the whole difficulty untouched. It is better, certainly,
in this form, "Give us your labor, and the household begins."
I see not how serious labor, the labor of all and every day is to
be avoided. . . .3
Taken in its most literal fashion, this passage would seem to indicate
an absolutely egalitarian approach to housework. It is unlikely, how-
ever, that the sage of Concord was prepared to do laundry. In fact,
there are other passages in the essay which reflect the view that do-
mestic chores belong to women. What he was attempting, rather,
was to combat the application of invidious caste distinctions to domes-
tics. In his judgment, Americans needed to rethink their approach
to manual labor:
. . . many things betoken a revolution of opinion and practice

in regard to manual labor that may go far to aid our practical
inquiry. . . . But the reform that applies itself to the house-
hold must not be partial. It must correct the whole system of
our social living. It must come with plain living and high
thinking; it must break up caste and put domestic service on
another foundation.4
We know that Emerson tried to put this approach into practice in

his own household, developing an interest in the daily allocation of
work, for example, and attempting to persuade the Irish cook to take
her meals with the family.8
If the just household must free itself from caste, it must also em-
body other virtues such as charity and hospitality. Emerson urged his
38 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
countrymen and -women to go beyond material comfort and pru-

dence in envisioning the ideal home:
With these [purely material] ends housekeeping is not beau-

tiful; it cheers and raises neither the husband, the wife, nor
the child; neither the host nor the guest; it oppresses women.
A house kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a
few women, and their success is dearly bought.8
In the second place Emerson's emphasis on the importance of hos-

pitality is so marked that it seems clear that he was trying to mediate
between the public and private spheres in this fashion. On the one
hand, he pointed out that domestic life is more salient to most of us
than the public life of the world outside the home: "Domestic events
are certainly our affair. What are called public events may or may
not be ours." But on the other hand, he was astute enough to realize
that it would be bad for a society should families simply retreat into
their homes. Therefore, families should be hospitable: "Let a man
then say, My house is here in the county for the culture of the
county;—an eating-house and sleeping house for travellers it shall
be. . . ." Rather than being the castle of the man who dwells there,
the virtuous home will be a shrine radiating outward, "pulses of
thought that go to the borders of the universe." Thus the leading
American intellectual of the nineteenth century not only took the
home seriously but also tried explicitly to bridge the gap between
home and the world. That his writings had a contemporary impact
is suggested by the fact that in 1897, Lucy Salmon used Emerson's
thoughts about eliminating caste in the household as the frontispiece
for her book, Domestic Service.
Despite his wife's frequent ill health, Emerson offered hospitality
on the scale he himself advocated. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, a feminist
lecturer, stayed with the Emersons when she spoke to the Lyceum of
Concord. In her memoirs she recalled the experience as follows: "It
was indeed a model household." Everything was fresh, clean, and
well ordered, she remembered. The food was wholesome, and meals
were enhanced by "Mr. Emerson so quietly breathing out his pre-
cious aphorisms."7
Unfortunately, however, though Lidian Emerson took pride in her

housekeeping and evidently did a good job as a hostess, she had to
cope with bouts of invalidism throughout most of her adult life. Her
frequent illnesses suggest that she found her role as the wife of a
Great Man to provide insufficient nourishment for her own ego.8
Thus we glimpse the darker side of domesticity. Despite the valoriza-
tion of home, an entirely house-bound wife might be prey to debili-
tating depressions, and this even when her husband was, like
Emerson, geuninely interested in the domestic sphere.
Emerson's Concord neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was another
major male writer who drew upon the tenets of the ideology of do-
mesticity. In The House of the Seven Gables, published in 1851 and
hence contemporaneous with The Wide, Wide World and Uncle
Tom's Cabin, he even drew on the conventions of the domestic novel.
This is indeed ironic considering his well-known outburst against
the "damned mob of scribbling women," whose novels were outsell-
ing his. Nonetheless, the ideology of domesticity was sufficiently per-
vasive that it found its way into his novel. In fact, a house and a
housewife embody the moral polarities of The House of the Seven
Gables.
This work is a chronicle of the Pyncheon family from its Puritan
origins to its decline in the mid-nineteenth century. Hawthorne's
imagination, haunted as it was by the impact of the past, created a
house whose forbidding appearance bespeaks the rapacity and un-
happiness that were the Pyncheon family heritage. How this should
happen he explains on the first page:
The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me

like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of
outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also of the long
lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have
passed within.9
No physical detail of the house escapes his attention, from the archi-
tecture to the furnishings to the tea cups.
The Pyncheon family had acquired title to the land because of
the death of its original owner, Matthew Maule. Colonel Pyncheon
40 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
had collaborated in the witchcraft prosecution—and execution—of the

rightful owner, and at the moment of death Maule had laid a curse
on the Pyncheons. As the novel opens, the gloomy and decaying
dwelling of an accursed family is being occupied by poor Hepzibah
Pyncheon. Tall, angular, unmarried, and dried-up, Hepzibah is in-
capable of doing anything to combat the all-pervasive gloom and is,
in fact, the antithesis of the good housewife. Hawthorne does show
us, however, that she has a tender heart despite her scowling
countenance.
Both the house and the family are thus in a state of decay when
young Phoebe Pyncheon arrives for a visit. If Hepzibah is the anti-
thesis, then cousin Phoebe is the prototype of the notable housewife:
Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their

exclusive patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement. It is a
kind of natural magic that enables the favored ones to bring out
the hidden capabilities of things around them; and particularly
to give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place which,
for however brief a period, may happen to be their home. A
wild hut of underbrush, tossed together by wayfarers through
the primitive forest, would acquire the home aspect by one
night's lodging of such a woman. . . .10
Godey's itself could not have given a better description of the ideal
housewife.
It soon appears that, if any human agency can redeem the
Pyncheons, it will be that of loving yet capable Phoebe. At one
point, Hepzibah even tells her that her housekeeping skills must
have come from her mother's side, because "I never knew a Pyncheon
that had any turn for them." Indeed, when Pyncheons are capable,
their ability takes the form of evil-doing, as in the case of Judge
Jaffrey Pyncheon, the villain, who has hounded Hepzibah and
her brother, Clifford, for years. After a complicated series of plot
turns, Hawthorne allows the novel to have a happy ending. Judge
Pyncheon dies, Phoebe is united with her lover Holgrave, a descen-
dant of the Maules, and the ineffectual Clifford Pyncheon is cleared
of any suspicion of murder with respect to his cousin's death. The
THE GOLDEN AGE OF DOMESTICITY 4!
house itself is beyond redemption so Phoebe and Holgrave make

plans to live in the judge's country home.
Just before the final resolution—after Judge Pyncheon's death but
before its discovery—there is a scene in which Clifford and Hepzibah
are fleeing from their home. Nearly unbalanced by the years of un-
happiness betokened by the very appearance of the house of the
seven gables, Clifford harangues a stranger on a train about the lib-
erating possibilities of the railroad. Mankind will be able to return
to a nomadic state, thanks to this invention, he proclaims. "It is as
clear to me as sunshine—were there any in the sky—that the greatest
possible stumbling blocks in the path of human happiness and im-
provement, are these heaps of bricks, and stones, consolidated with
mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which
men painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house
and home!"11 No doubt Clifford denies the value of "home" because
his own house embodies evil. But in giving this character a speech
rejecting one of the most important values of the culture, Hawthorne
clearly means to shock his readers into understanding the depths of
Clifford's despair. So much is the cult of domesticity woven into the
fabric of the novel, then, that it would be virtually impossible to
understand Hawthorne's intention should the reader be ignorant of
the centrality of the home to most Americans at the time it was
written.
Taken together, Emerson's essay and Hawthorne's novel offer a
program for the American home. It should be free of caste, hospita-
ble, loving, and inhabited by a family whose way of life could be
emulated by others. Hawthorne further demonstrated an acute sen-
sitivity to the physical appearance of the home and its appurtenances.
Not surprisingly, given the level of interest in the home at mid-
century, thousands of Americans shared this interest in the physical
characteristics of the house itself and were eager to buy books about
architecture. As Henry Ward Beecher put it, "A house is the shape
a man's thoughts take when he imagines how he should like to live.
Its interior is the measure of his social and domestic nature. . . ,"12
Therefore, the question of design was suffused with moral signifi-
cance.13 Middle-class men and women wanted advice on this topic as
42 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
they wanted advice on behavior from Catharine Beecher, Henry

Clarke Wright, and others. Moreover, they sought help in this area
for the same reason that they sought it with respect to styles of con-
duct: the United States was an experiment in a republican society.
Not only would there be a new etiquette but pleasant housing would
be diffused much more widely throughout the entire land than in
the class-ridden Old World. What would houses look like?
Andrew Jackson Downing was perhaps the best known of several
authors who wrote profusely illustrated books about the American
home during this period. Indeed, his Architecture of Country Houses
sold more than 16,000 copies by the end of the Civil War. A land-
scape architect in New York, Downing had firm ideas about how
design could express the moral nature of the homeowner. A modest,
unpretentious dwelling demonstrated that the owner was free of false
ambition, for example. Moreover, he believed, "Something of a love
for the beautiful, in the inmates, is always suggested by a vine-
covered cottage, because mere utility would never lead any person
to plant flowering vines."14 Vines, thus, add to the "domestic ex-
pression" of the house and enhance the quality of "heart" it possesses.
Downing also believed that every American dwelling could represent
the "home of a virtuous citizen."15 Here again we encounter the po-
litical overtones of the cult of domesticity. If well-educated mothers
were to inculcate republican values in their offspring, they would be
better able to do so in the appropriate domestic surroundings.
Literate people of both sexes, then, were reading books and pe-
riodicals in which the cult of domesticity found expression. Men had
access to works reflecting domestic values by many of the leading
writers of the age as well as to the numerous "pattern books" about
domestic architecture. Nor should we assume that women alone read
Godey's and the domestic novels. Catharine Sedgwick was flattered
to learn that Chief Justice John Marshall was an admirer of her
writing, for example.18 But above all, the career of Sarah Josepha
Hale, the editor of Godey's, reveals the extent to which men paid
heed to a genre, the so-called woman's magazine, which would be-
come "for women only" in the twentieth century.
One of the great editors in American history, Sarah Josepha Hale

began her collaboration with Louis Godey in the 18305. Together
they launched Godey's Lady's Book, which she continued to edit
until 1877, her ninetieth year. Godey's contained fiction, poetry,
needlework patterns, designs for model homes, and illustrations of
the latest fashions, as well as Hale's editorials. In its pages appeared
the writing of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Catharine Beecher, and Harriet
Beecher Stowe, to cite only a few of its distinguished contributors.
At its height Godey's had a circulation of 150,000, with a growth
paralleling the growth of the domestic novel. Unquestionably, Hale
was one of the two or three most influential American women of the
nineteenth century.
No feminist by modern standards—she opposed woman suffrage
and believed in clearly delineated separate spheres for the two sexes-
Hale was nonetheless a forceful advocate of many improvements in
woman's status. She campaigned for better education for women, in-
cluding higher education. She campaigned for the admission of
women to the medical profession. She campaigned for property rights
for married women. The list of her favorite reforms would be a long
one. Moreover, despite her aversion to women casting ballots, she
did not draw the line at other forms of political activity such as writ-
ing letters to politicians. Indeed, in the pursuit of her most cherished
goal of having the President set aside a national Thanksgiving Day,
she fired off a constant barrage of letters to governors, senators, secre-
taries of state, and Presidents. Henry Clay wrote to thank her for
her gifts to himself and his wife, concluding, "I also received the
book and papers which you were good enough to send and I shall seize
the earliest opportunity to peruse them."17 Another instance of her
impact on men is contained in a letter from Oliver Wendell Holmes,
who went so far as to tell her, "Thank you for the 'Editor's Tables'—
I read them all and agree with every word you say about women."18
In 1863, President Lincoln rewarded her efforts on behalf of
Thanksgiving Day by proclaiming it as a national holiday. This was
an open acknowledgment not only of Hale's influence but also of
44 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
the political ramifications of domesticity, because Hale had based her

campaign for the holiday on the political benefits to be derived from
a feast in which the whole nation could participate at once.
Although Godey's published both male and female authors and
was evidently read by at least a few men, it was clearly designed for
a female audience. Not so with Hearth and Home, a short-lived but
remarkable periodical whose first issue appeared in December 1868,
with Harriet Beecher Stowe listed as a co-editor. What makes Hearth
and Home a revealing document of the Golden Age of Domesticity
is the fact that, with so domestic a name, it was designed to appeal
to both sexes. In addition to patterns and recipes, excerpts from Old-
town Folks, and pieces by Rebecca Harding Davis and Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, Hearth and Home published market infor-
mation, agricultural advice, and national and international news. It
also published a few overtly feminist articles. The issue of October
23, 1869, contained, for example, Grace Greenwood's reply to an
anti-feminist statement by Horace Greeley. Greenwood asserted that
not all women necessarily wanted to be household queens and that
many preferred to be self-supporting. She thought young women
should choose a career for themselves. Other issues contained discus-
sions of the merits of cooperative housekeeping, and Harriet Beecher
Stowe's forthright reply to an anti-suffrage diatribe by Horace Bush-
nell.19 Thus we see that at the height of the Golden Age, a publica-
tion fundamentally celebrating domesticity did not confine itself to
sentimentalizing narrowly prescribed roles for women but rather
reached out to encompass both sexes and to incorporate divergent
views on such matters as suffrage and woman's optimal role.
So uniformly accepted a symbol of middle-class values had the
home become, then, by mid-century, that it was a logical rallying
point for those who wanted to change the world and, in particular,
improve the lot of women. Catharine Beecher used the home to jus-
tify opening up the profession of teaching to her sex and also to
justify making women guardians of the public welfare. Harriet
Beecher Stowe gave vivid depictions of notable housewives in her
novels and then used the values these characters symbolized to launch
a revolutionary attack on the values of the larger society. Antoinette
Brown Blackwell developed a view of the home as a source of renewal

for reform energies and ultimately had the courage and imagination
to envision a society in which both sexes might share domestic re-
sponsibilities as well as having access to the public sphere. Although
these women were the leading exemplars of an epic style of domes-
ticity, there were others, too, who shared their vision, in particular
two members of the Unitarian clergy, Theodore Parker and Samuel
May. The connection between home and world that found its first
expression in the ideology of Republican Motherhood thus came to
full fruition by the middle of the nineteenth century.
Catharine Esther Beecher was the oldest of the remarkable off-
spring of Lyman Beecher, a group that also included Harriet Beecher
Stowe, the outspoken feminist Isabella Beecher Hooker, Henry Ward
Beecher, and a number of other well-respected clergymen. Like
many of her siblings, Catharine Beecher launched a rebellion against
her father's Calvinist God (although the Calvinism in her father's
thought was far less fierce than the seventeenth-century original).
When she was twenty-one, her fianc6 drowned at sea, a tragedy that
required her to forge an independent life for herself and also made
her unwilling to accept the traditional Calvinist world-view, a view
that would have damned the unconverted Alexander Fisher to eternal
punishment.20 She went on not only to found her own schools for
young women but also to launch a long campaign aimed at recruiting
young women as teachers. She also dared to write theological treatises
expressing her opinions on the importance of free will and human
agency. She was perhaps best known in her own day, however, for
A Treatise on Domestic Economy. In short, in creating her own
identity she became an important female progenitor as teacher, as
home economist, as architect, and as theologian.21
That so outstanding a pioneer and so forceful a personality held
entirely traditional views on woman suffrage and woman's sphere
should not surprise us. In fact, there was a continuum of opinion on
such issues in the nineteenth century, and many of those—such as
Sarah Josepha Hale—who crusaded for change in some areas were
unwilling to endorse suffrage.22 Her conservative views on women
and ballots notwithstanding, Catharine Beecher, in her Treatise of
46 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
1841, made larger claims for American women than had ever been
publicly made before with very few exceptions (such as the speeches
and writings of Sarah and Angelina Grimke). Simply put, Beecher
maintained that American democracy rose or fell on the efforts of its
female members.
If the home, optimally a loving one, was the most universally
shared institution in a hyper-competitive, atomized society, then it
had the unique capacity to soften the asperities of life and to prevent
society from fragmenting. As Kathryn Kish Sklar puts it in her biog-
raphy of Beecher:
Like other writers of the period including Sarah Josepha Hale

and Horace Bushnell, Catharine Beecher believed that the
values of the home stood in opposition to some other values,
but unlike Bushnell and Hale, she wanted the same set of
values to apply to both spheres, and she was far more aggressive
in applying domestic values to the rest of society.23
As guardians of the home, women had a special role to play. All

that they had to do was to surrender their claims to civil and political
affairs and acknowledge a subordination in some regards. They could
then claim their rightful place as moral leaders:
In matters pertaining to the education of their children, in the

selection and support of a clergyman, in all benevolent enter-
prises, and in all questions relating to morals or manners, they
have a superior influence. In all such concerns, it would be im-
possible to carry a point contrary to their judgment and feelings;
while an enterprise, sustained by them, will seldom fail of
success.24
It is important to recognize just how political a formulation Beecher

is offering here, despite having proclaimed that politics should be off-
limits to women. It is political, in the broadest definition of the term,
because there are other means of exerting influence in a society be-
sides voting. In fact, she is reserving for women the preponderance
of influence in education, in charitable activities, and in the selection
of clergymen. This clearly represents a sharp break with Anglo-
American tradition as well as being virtually a program for women's

voluntary activities in the nineteenth century.
Ten years after the publication of her treatise on domestic econ-
omy, having been embroiled in controversies over the funding of her
schools, she was even more explicit about what women needed to do
to advance their own cause: they must organize. Only "the organiza-
tion of women as women" could "redress the deep wrongs that have
so long and so heavily oppressed them."25 The wrongs she had in
mind were no doubt financial ones, a sore subject for one who was
frequently hampered by the difficulty of raising money. Eventually
she came around to the clearly proto-feminist idea that all women
should possess the ability to support themselves:
The ability to secure an independent livelihood and honorable

employ suited to her education and capacities, are the only
true foundation of the social elevation of women, even in the
very highest classes of society. While she continues to be edu-
cated only to be somebody's wife, and is left without any aim
in life till that somebody, either in love, or in pity, or in selfish
regard, at last grants her the opportunity, she can never be
truly independent.26
Yet despite this stance, she was very decided in the opinion that
women need a good domestic education, too. Her numerous publica-
tions on the subject of domestic economy reflect the high value she
placed on excellence, on expertise, in the performance of domestic
duties. To compare the tone and content of Lydia Maria Child's
American Frugal Housewife of 1829 with A Treatise on Domestic
Economy (1841) offers a valuable perspective on the elevated status
of home at mid-century. Child had given common-sense advice in a
matter-of-fact tone with only a modicum of philosophizing about
what the optimum home might be. Beecher, on the other hand, be-
gan with extensive quotations from Alexis de Tocqueville on the role
of American women. Tocqueville had remarked that, although Amer-
ican women were confined to the domestic sphere, their influence
was vast. Beecher then employed these remarks as the starting point
for her own program for American women, a program that was both
4« JUST A HOUSEWIFE
domestic and political from the first page. Child had leaped from
topic to topic in a rather unsystematic fashion. Conversely, Beecher
attempted to give an organized and exhaustive compendium of every-
thing that a housewife might need to know, replete with the latest
scientific information wherever applicable. In so doing, she enhanced
the home's ability to serve as an arena for the display of female
prowess.
If one examines her advice in just one area, laundry, one will be
struck by how much brain work is called for in addition to the physi-
cal effort. Making the soap, or purchasing it as the case might be,
was only the first step. Each type of fabric would benefit from treat-
ment with a specific substance:
Some persons wash calico in bran-water, without soap. For this

purpose, boil four quarts of wheat bran in two pailfuls of
water; strain it, and when lukewarm, divide it into two parts.
Wash the calico first in one and then in the other water. Then
rinse, wring hard, and hang out to dry. Potato-water is equally
good.27
Standing on the firm foundation of the American home, Beecher

thus claimed for well-educated women the right to be guardians of
the public welfare in several ways. Women must have the superior
influence in charitable activities. Women must educate the young at
home and at school. And women, cultivating their domestic skills to
the highest possible degree of competence must preside over homes
so loving and well ordered that they could provide the cohesion for
the entire society. The only prerequisite for the woman in all of this
was the willingness to practice self-denial. It is only fair to point out,
however, that Beecher thought that men, too, should be self-sacrific-
ing. Indeed, the general rule should be that the stronger should
sacrifice for the weaker.28 What is most important is the extent to
which the home and the world were intertwined in Beecher's for-
mulation.
Where Beecher's work was implicitly political without referring to
specific legislative actions, the work of her sister Harriet was much
more explicitly political—the writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin was un-

dertaken in direct response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act
of 1850. Outrage over a law that gave incentives to judges to return
men and women to bondage was coupled in Stowe's mind with com-
passion for slave mothers, who could so readily be separated from be-
loved children. Together, these sentiments transformed a woman who
had written occasional pieces for Godey's into a major writer. Yet her
powerful emotions in themselves would have been insufficient for
this transformation had it not been for the status of domesticity at
the time she began to write. The elevated view of the home and the
housewife gave her both a touchstone of values and the self-confi-
dence to tackle so ambitious a topic as slavery. This seems manifest
because the novel is filled with domestic images and values. The
status of the home in the culture then helped to give her the largest
audience that any American author reached during the entire nine-
teenth century.
It is important to note at the outset all that was remarkable about
the writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin, First, American novelists had
been—almost to a person—silent on the subject of slavery up to 1851.
Second, although women writers were tapping a vast market with
the domestic novel, there were few attempting to write on public is-
sues for a general audience. Margaret Fuller, who drowned at sea in
1850, had struck many of her contemporaries as an anomaly because
of her wide-ranging intellectual claims. Female abolitionist lecturers
stirred up storms of outrage when they dared to speak in public.
Finally, Stowe, though the member of an accomplished family, had
no reason to think of herself as destined for a public role. Her life
had been difficult, as we have seen, because her husband Calvin was
never able to provide more than the barest necessities for his family,
and Stowe's own writing did not yet provide enough revenue to sup-
ply the lack. Indeed, just before Uncle Tom's Cabin made her a
world-wide celebrity, she had written a letter to Sarah Josepha Hale,
responding to Hale's request for her likeness and for biographical in-
formation, in which she specifically denied having any claim on the
public's attention: "My sister Catherine has lived much more of a
JO JUST A HOUSEWIFE
life—and done more that can be told of than I whose course and em-
ployments have always been retired and domestic. . . . I have been
mother to seven children—six of whom are now living. . . ,"29
Modest though this statement is, it provides the essential clue to
Stowe's motivation for writing her masterpiece: she had just suffered
the death of a much-loved infant son, and she could not bear to think
of the slave system or of a law that might visit the cruel fate of per-
manent separation from her child on a slave mother. Stowe's child
died approximately one year before the passage of the Fugitive Slave
Act. When a sister-in-law wrote this appeal to her in response to the
law's passage, "Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can I would write
something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed
thing slavery is," she was ready.30 Despite the birth of her last child
in 1850, her words poured onto the pages, and the first installment of
Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in The National Era on June 5, 1851.
It would be hard to overstate the success of the serialized version and
then the novel. At long last, an American novelist had had the cour-
age to break the silence about slavery. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
recorded a typical reaction in his journal: "How she is shaking the
world with her Uncle Tom's Cabin! At one step she has reached the
top of the stair-case up which the rest of us climb on our knees year
after year. Never was there such a literary coup-de-main as this."31
Stowe began to receive an outpouring of letters in response to her
novel. To one correspondent, a member of the British aristocracy,
she replied as follows: "I wrote what I did because as a woman, as
a mother, I was oppressed and broken hearted with the sorrows and
injustice I saw."32
The novel is a stunning achievement because it combines moral
and religious passion with the realistic detail of a genre painting.
Stowe wanted to replace the sordid, unchristian, money-grubbing
values of the marketplace and the accommodationist politics of those
who voted for the Fugitive Slave Act with a new set of values based
on true Christianity and love. But rather than a Utopian approach to
what could replace the status quo, she had a very practical vision,
which was the set of values and behavior to be found in a loving
Christian home presided over by a large-hearted woman. In the
words of Jane Tompkins, "the popular domestic novel of the nine-

teenth century represents a monumental effort to reorganize culture
from the woman's point of view," and Uncle Tom's Cabin is the
"summa theologica" of this effort.33
In his introduction to the 1962 Harvard edition of Uncle Tom's
Cabin, Kenneth Lynn ponders what could have enabled the preach-
er's daughter, living on the edge of genteel poverty, to write the first
masterpiece of American realism. It is unlikely that she had read
Balzac, for example. All the evidence indicates that she was steeped
in the Romantic tradition, with its view of the isolated self versus
society, a genre she was to transcend in Uncle Tom's Cabin. "What
was the force that propelled her to such creative audacity?" he queries.
His answer is that her imagination was unleashed by the revolt
against her father's Calvinism. No doubt this is part of the explana-
tion, because each of Lyman Beecher's children had to chart his or
her own religious course. But the other part of the explanation, un-
noticed in 1962 because the cult of domesticity had not yet received
a name, is that her creative imagination was also triggered by the
necessity to provide homely details about domestic settings in order
to render a convincing case for the saving grace of home.
In fact, if we were to examine Stowe's novels as a group we would
find that the housewives constitute a veritable gallery of competent
women, while the kitchens and the cookery receive careful attention,
too. The Widow Scudder in The Minister's Wooing is a particularly
accomplished example of the notable housewife because she is gifted
with "faculty." As Stowe explains to her readers: "Faculty is Yankee
for savoir faire and the opposite virtue to shiftlessness." She gives an-
other character this speech explaining the Widow Scudder's achieve-
ments: "Cerinthy Ann, it's faculty—that's it; them that has it has it,
and them that hasn't—why they've got to work hard and not do half
so well, neither." As an example of the summit of housekeeping
skill, we find the following description of a tea, prepared exclusively
by the widow and her daughter:
Meanwhile the tea-table had been silently gathering on its

snowy plateau the delicate china, the golden butter, the loaf of
52 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
faultless cake, a plate of crullers or wonders, as a sort of sweet

fried cake was commonly called,—tea rusks, light as a puff, and
shining on top with a varnish of egg,—jellies of apple and
quince quivering in amber clearness,—whitest and purest honey
in the comb,—in short, everything that could go to the
getting-up of a most faultless tea.34
On the one hand, Stowe spoke out against slavery in Uncle Tom's
Cabin and analyzed the Calvinist heritage in her New England
novels. On the other hand, the religious, political, and ethical reflec-
tions in these novels are always interspersed with domestic descrip-
tions, as if the latter reinforced her confidence for tackling the for-
mer. Writing an autobiography in the twentieth century, the novelist
and giver of domestic advice Marion Harland (Mary Virginia Ter-
hune) recalled a helpful neighbor she had known as a girl: "She was
a 'capable' housewife, according to Mrs. Stowe's characterization of
the guild."38 In other words, Stowe's housewives, in their vividly ren-
dered settings, were so memorable as to constitute a category of their
own.
Yet despite her respect for "faculty," Stowe shows us in Uncle
Tom's Cabin that it is not enough. There are two skilled housewives
in this novel: Miss Ophelia St. Clare of Vermont and Mrs. Rachel
Halliday of Ohio. Only when Miss Ophelia learns to feel, like Rachel,
a generosity of spirit toward blacks, does she become a fully sympa-
thetic character.
Rather than recapitulating the entire book, we can examine se-
lected episodes in order to gain an appreciation of the extent to which
Uncle Tom's Cabin advanced an epic view of domesticity and of the
housewife. The first two episodes involve Eliza Harris, a young slave
mother who escapes across the fro/en Ohio River to free territory
with her small son rather than permit him to be sold away from her.
By coincidence, Eliza and Harry seek refuge at the home of a senator
who has recently voted for the Fugitive Slave Act. He has just fin-
ished explaining to his gentle, submissive, but unconvinced wife why
reasons of state required him to support this legislation, when a ser-
vant announces the arrival of the fugitives. Eliza appeals to Mrs.
Bird for help by saying, "Ma'am, have you ever lost a child?" It so
happens that Mrs. Bird has buried a beloved child only a month
earlier. Invoking the moral authority of the bereaved mother, she
persuades her husband to spirit the fugitives to safety. This episode
thus dramatically illustrates the kind of power women possess if only
they will assert it.
A slightly later episode shows Eliza and her son under the shelter-
ing wings of a Quaker family whose home embodies all of Stowe's
most deeply felt values. The kitchen is bright and neat, the chairs
themselves convey hospitality, but, above all, Rachel Halliday has "a
heart as good and true as ever throbbed in woman's bosom." Far from
envisioning their home as an enclave sacred to the family alone, these
Quakers make a point of sharing their living quarters with fugitive
slaves. Because their domestic activities form the moral center of the
novel, Stowe describes the most mundane details such as fixing break-
fast with the "joyous fizzle" of chicken and ham frying and the grid-
dle cakes that reached the "true, exact, golden-brown tint of perfec-
tion."39
With his wife and child safe, at least momentarily, Eliza's husband
George also finds his way to the Quaker settlement. He has been un-
dergoing religious doubts because of the cruel stresses to which his
family has been subjected. Nonetheless, in coming down to the Halli-
day's breakfast table, George has an experience of what we might
call the domestic sublime:
It was the first time that ever George had sat down on equal
terms at any white man's table; and he sat down, at first, with
some constraint and awkwardness; but they exhaled and went
off like fog, in the genial morning rays of their simple, over-
flowing kindness.
This, indeed was a home,—home, a word that George had
never yet known a meaning for; and a belief in God, and trust
in his providence, began to encircle his heart, as, with a golden
cloud of protection and confidence. . . ,37
For Stowe, thus, as for Horace Bushnell, home had a specifically re-
ligious function.38
In these terms, to be a good housekeeper is clearly fraught with
54 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
moral significance. Stowe gives a complex depiction of Miss Ophelia,

the New England cousin of a southern plantation owner, who is
called upon to bring order to her cousin's household. Augustine St.
Clare, the plantation owner, represents the way in which the slave
system promotes moral decay even among decent people. He has
abdicated from assuming moral and religious responsibility for his
household, and his wife is similarly unwilling to exert herself to
bring order out of chaos where the domestic sphere is concerned.
Marie St. Clare is "indolent and childish, unsystematic and improvi-
dent." It is, therefore, necessary to send to Vermont to obtain the ser-
vices of Miss Ophelia, "the absolute bond-servant of the 'ought.'"
Arriving in New Orleans, Miss Ophelia sets to work:
The first morning of her regency, Miss Ophelia was up at four
o'clock; and having attended to all the adjustments of her own
chamber, as she had done ever since she came there, to the
great amazement of the chambermaid, she prepared for a vigor-
ous onslaught on the cupboards and closets of the establish-
ment of which she had the keys.
The store-room, the linen-presses, the china-closet, the
kitchen and cellar, that day all went under an awful review.
Hidden things of darkness were brought to light to an extent
that alarmed all the principalities and powers of kitchen and
chamber. . . ,39
Despite her command of the domestic arts, however, this prototypical
Yankee notable housewife is flawed because she is guilty of racism.
Only when she overcomes her aversion to black skin and learns to
love the slave child Topsy can she partake of the same moral quali-
ties as Rachel Halliday. In other words, domesticity for its own sake
is insufficient for Stowe. It must be wedded to a generous social
vision.
If Miss Ophelia and Rachel Halliday represent different gradations
of the notable housewife archetype and their homes reflect their
capacities and moral qualities, then Simon Legree is the antithesis,
and his home, an anti-home.40 Cruel to his mother in his youth,
Legree has grown up to repudiate all the values summed up in the
cult of domesticity. His home is not only disorderly but filthy,
"ragged," and "forlorn" in appearance because of Legree's "coarse

neglect." Rather than a pleasant meal such as breakfast at the Quaker
settlement, we are shown a scene of drunken carousal at Legree's
plantation. Further, he has never married, preferring to exploit a
series of slave mistresses. In effect, Legree has closed out the possi-
bility of any refining female influence that might soften his brutality
to his slaves. Having rejected Christianity, too, he confronts the
powerless with the full force of unmitigated greed.
In offering us an anti-home as a counter to the home of the Halli-
days, Stowe is trying to dramatize what is wrong with a society that
does not pay sufficient heed to its mothers and to their values. Legree's
home is an extreme, but it demonstrates the potential for evil in let-
ting market-oriented values hold full sway. Lest the reader conclude
that only women have access to the right values, however, Stowe
makes her title character a man who is gentle and kind but who pos-
sesses the moral strength to stand up to Legree. Indeed, Stowe is
clearly trying to create a new model of strength appropriate for both
sexes. Uncle Tom gets the better of Legree—despite Legree's respon-
sibility for his death—because he is true to his faith and to his prin-
ciples. This is a victory achieved not with physical force but with
moral courage aided by divine grace. As such, it is a gender-free ideal
and fully commensurate with an epic style of domesticity.
A series of articles Stowe wrote during the darkest days of the
Civil War reveal yet another facet of her approach to domesticity. In
effect, she offered "household merriment" as an antidote to what the
twentieth century has called existential despair, in this case, despair
caused by the toll on the battlefield. Using the pen name of Chris-
topher Crowfield—no doubt trying to appeal to male readers—she ex-
tolled the good housewife, the joys of lavishing care on house plants,
and the brightness of sunny rooms, among other matters.41 She ex-
plained to her publisher:
I feel I need to write in these days to keep from thinking
things that make me dizzy and blind, and fill my eyes with
tears so that I cannot see the paper. I mean such things as are
being done where our heroes are dying as Shaw died. It is not
wise that all our literature should run in a rut cut through our
56 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
hearts and red with our blood. I feel the need of a little gentle
household merriment and talk of common things, to indulge
which I have devised the following.42
We can only assume that Stowe must have turned to nurturing ac-
tivities herself prior to this as a way of finding solace for the loss of
two beloved sons (another son had died in 1857).
Finally, although Stowe held back from full-fledged participation
in the nascent feminist movement in her prime and evidently became
more conservative as she aged,43 she did endorse suffrage—unlike her
sister Catharine—in the pages of Hearth and Home. Moreover, dur-
ing the crisis years of the 18505, she advocated a forceful public role
for women. In her recollections of Stowe, Annie Fields says that,
after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the author of Uncle
Tom's Cabin engaged in "constant correspondence" with Charles
Sumner and other like-minded politicians so as to keep abreast of
events. She then issued an appeal to the women of America: "The
first duty of every American woman at this time is to thoroughly
understand the subject for herself and to feel that she is bound to
use her influence for the right." Stowe went on to enumerate ways
in which women could exert this influence such as circulating peti-
tions, hiring lecturers, and circulating congressional speeches.44
Thus, the larger political implications of Stowe's work and of her
life are manifest. She held up images of female competence and the
worth of the home while exhorting women to activity outside the
home during the years of the sectional crisis. Moreover, in the char-
acters of Uncle Tom and the pseudonymous Christopher Crowfield,
she tried to show that men, too, could partake of the virtues engen-
dered by home. And in describing the home of Rachel Halliday, al-
ways open to those in need of refuge, she gave a concrete demonstra-
tion of the redemptive capacity of a loving home. Like her sister,
Stowe possessed an epic vision of domesticity.
One contemporary who understood exactly what Stowe was about
was Theodore Parker. Home enlarges, he argued. "Its human or gen-
eralizing power may be seen in the character of woman, on whom
most of its cares, duties and pleasures, too, as things now are, seem to
devolve, as her sphere is home." Therefore it was not surprising to
Parker that a woman should have broken the silence of American

literature—which had been "deaf as a cent to the outcry of humanity
expiring in agonies"—on the subject of slavery. "Do you not hear the
cry which, in New England, a woman is raising in the world's ears
against the foul wrong which America is working in the world?"45
Home is the center of love and kindness; women are closer to home
than men are and are thus better able to sensitize themselves to the
plight of the unfortunate. But there is a remedy for men: "Discharge
lovingly the duties owed to wife and child, by and by you shall won
der how your heart beats with men afar off, for the wrongs of red
men, black men, man everywhere."46
As in the 17705 when American homes and housewives made pos-
sible the successful boycott of British goods, thus putting pressure OP
the British to rescind unpopular legislation, American homes were
being called upon to serve as a political resource, energizing men and
women of good will to fight against slavery. That a militant aboli-
tionist—as Parker clearly was47—endorsed this view of the matter is
one more indication of the pervasiveness of the ideology of domes-
ticity. It is also indicative of the fact that home and history were more
firmly intertwined than ever. That is, the domestic sphere was not
viewed as an ahistorical enclave where people could meet basic needs,
as it had been in the colonial period, but rather as a dynamic scene
of actions that could affect the outcome of history. Proof of the valid-
ity of this approach was the undeniable fact that one such action had
been carried out at home and by a woman whose employments had
"always been retired and domestic": the writing of Uncle Tom's
Cabin. That Stowe's work had affected the outcome of history was
attested to by the widely quoted remark Lincoln is supposed to have
made to her when they met during the Civil War: "So this is the
little woman who made this big war."
Emerson had enjoined hospitality to bridge the gap between home
and the world. Stowe advocated remaking the world in the home's
image, suggesting, too, that both sexes could participate in domes-
ticity in some fashion, whether by creating it or by celebrating it. For
both of these writers, however, the day-by-day running of the home
belonged to women alone. This assignment of duties to each sex was
58 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
so ingrained a cultural assumption that even visionaries rarely ques-

tioned it. Thus to encounter a woman who did question it is to en-
counter a most unusual human being—such as Antoinette Brown
Blackwell, the first woman to be ordained as a Protestant minister in
this country.48
Blackwell had a long and extraordinary life, from lecturing about
abolition in the antebellum years to casting a vote in 1920. Born in
1825 and raised on a farm in upstate New York, she managed to
make her way to Oberlin for a college education less than ten years
after this institution had opened its doors to women. At Oberlin she
received the theological training that enabled her to be ordained in
1853. (She served a parish only briefly, devoting most of her energies
to guest sermons and to her lectures and writing.) At Oberlin she
formed a friendship with Lucy Stone that would prove to be a life-
long one, enhanced by the fact that they eventually married brothers.
After graduation and before the two women married, however, they
both launched careers as feminist-abolitionist lecturers. As she trav-
eled to advance her causes, Blackwell evidently pondered how some-
one with her values and unusual style of life would ever be able to
enjoy any of the domestic comforts of a home, assuming as she then
did that she would never meet a man who would share her values.
She wrote a letter to Stone outlining her plan to adopt some "ragged,
outcast" children and thereby establish a home:
Then again I can't go wandering up and down the earth with-

out any home. Not can't because it would require too much self-
denial, but because I should get to [sic] excited and too down
hearted from reaction to accomplish anything. . . . I need a
pleasant happy home to rest in and some pleasant happy chil-
dren there to keep me from being a misanthrope. Dear Lucy I
do think we are in danger of this; it is my greatest temptation
and sometimes I almost feel it did no good to try to make people
better. . . . But give me a quiet home surrounded by trees and
flowers and there I can worship God and love the world and
can make as many and as long lecturing tours as seems best
and go when and where Providence makes an opening.49
She thought that her father would be able to subsidize such an un-
dertaking, and that her own role would be that of an executive, di-
recting the work of a housekeeper and servants.
Significantly, Blackwell did not assume that there was any contra-
diction between activism and devotion to the home. Rather, she rec-
ognized that anyone subjected to the emotional stresses attendant on
the life of the reformer would need to have a loving home as a place
of emotional refreshment. Her proposed solution may have been un-
realistic and elitist inasmuch as it would have required that a woman
have a certain family wealth. Nonetheless it is further evidence of
the consonance of reform and domesticity at mid-century.
Antoinette Brown was fortunate enough to meet and marry a man,
Samuel Blackwell, who not only shared her values but also devoted
a substantial portion of his time to sharing the household responsi-
bilities.50 Giving birth to seven children, she sometimes found herself
discouraged by the volume of work, though, even with her husband's
cooperation. She wrote a rare complaining letter to Susan B. Anthony
in 1859 when her oldest child was three years old. Enumerating her
chores, she exclaimed, "This, Susan, is woman's sphere!"51 Another
letter she wrote that year, in this instance to Lucy Stone, expressed
near despair about married women's prospects for activism: "No one
has faith enough in me to lend a finger's worth of help. . . ."B2 But
as time went on, as a household routine was established, and after
Sam developed a business that could be carried on at home, her mood
lightened. In 1879 Blackwell wrote in a letter to Stone that she
wanted to organize her life so as to "give and take some home com-
fort."53 In fact, this phrase is very reminiscent of the tone of the let-
ter she had written to Stone nearly thirty years earlier in which she
had set forth what she wanted from a home.
That she herself experienced domestic comfort as something one
both gives and receives may be a part of the explanation for the fact
that Blackwell went further than any other thinker of her day in
envisioning a symmetrical gender system. In books, in articles in the
feminist periodical, the Woman's Journal, and at woman's congresses
attended by leading feminists of the immediate postwar period, she
60 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
enunciated her views. Both sexes should have a domestic role, and
both sexes should have a public role:
Wife and husband could be mutual helpers with admirable

effect. Let her take his place in garden or field or workshop an
hour or two daily, learning to breathe more strongly, and exer-
cising a fresh set of muscles in soul and body. To him baby
tending and bread making would be most humanizing in their
influence, all parties gaining an assured benefit. . . . We need
a general reconstruction in the division of labor. Let no women
give all their time to household duties, but require nearly all
women, and all men also, since they belong to the household,
to bear some share of the common household burdens.54
Even though her appeals for a more egalitarian division of house-

hold labor were aimed at a middle-class audience, she was astute
enough to understand that there were class as well as gender implica-
tions appertaining to asymmetrical sex roles. She referred to these
implications as follows:
. . . [It is] a false theory that because women are to be the

mothers of the race, therefore they are not to be the thinkers
or the pioneers in enterprise. This ancient dogma enfeebles one
class of women and degrades the other. We believe in a fairly
equal division of duties between men and women. . . . If
woman's sole responsibility is of the domestic type, one class
will be crushed by it and the other throw it off as a badge of
poverty.55
Implicit in this passage is the idea that it would be unfortunate should

domesticity be devalued in this fashion. In short, both women and
the home will be better off if women have opportunities outside the
home.
Blackwell believed that all human beings need to cultivate both
intimate ties and large social sympathies. While love for the multi-
tude may be "more broadly godlike" than home sympathies, it is in
the home that people learn to transcend self-interest in an immediate
fashion. To give women exercise for their brains and a larger public
role will not prove antithetical to the home because women will move
from "bound to rebound" between home and work: "A home-nest,
with the young birdlings in it, has warmth enough to shed its influ-
ence outward upon the maternal heart, go where it may; and the ac-
tive womanly brain, which has sufficient breadth to appreciate the
widest human interests, and to work to promote the welfare of the
race, stimulated by its deeper affections can have no difficulty in ap-
plying itself also to the loving details of the home regimen."56
All this did not necessarily add up to perfect symmetry. Women
might still bear somewhat more of the household responsibilities than
men, Blackwell conceded, and men more of those in the public
realm.67 Moreover, as we shall learn when we talk about the feminist
response to Charles Darwin, Blackwell was also willing to concede
that there might be biological differences between the sexes other
than merely in the reproductive systems. On balance, however, her
work represented a bold attempt to combine more flexible sex roles
with a deeply felt respect for the home. In effect, Blackwell linked
home and the world by calling for opportunities and responsibilities
for both sexes in both spheres.
The reformer and Unitarian clergyman, Samuel May, added yet
another dimension to the subject of allocating domestic chores. He
had what might be called a life-cycle approach to balancing private
and public duties. While the children are young, "the family . . .
ought never to be neglected for the service of the state, by the father
any more than the mother." When the children are raised, both sexes
should strive to contribute to the "common weal." He thought that
in general men were far likelier than women to be the disrupters of
families. Therefore, he saw no danger to the home in enfranchising
women, a development that would give women an important public
role.68
It was his unusual view of the human personality that underlay
this vision of the domestic sphere as something for which both sexes
need to accept responsibility: "A perfect character in either a man or
a woman, is a compound of the virtues and graces of each. . . . In
Jesus, the dearly beloved of God, we see as much feminine as mas-
62 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
culine grace."59 If the individual character requires this balance, so,

too, should the home and ultimately the state. In fact, the state needs
mothers as well as fathers.
May thus had a remarkably egalitarian and flexible view of gender
roles; in addition, he had the personal habit of extending hospitality
to all who needed it. After his death a friend recalled: "The home
was always a place of refuge for passing unfortunates, and was fa-
miliar with the tread of almost every man or woman who has con-
tributed conspicuously to American reform."60 In other words, for
May domestic sharing was of two varieties. On the one hand, it ex-
tended to the realm of responsibility, and on the other hand, it meant
making one's home freely available to outsiders. In a sense, May took
Emerson's prescription for the just household and made it democratic
with respect to gender, too.
If a whole range of Americans from domestic novelists, most no-
tably Harriet Beecher Stowe, to male "creators of culture" to reform-
ers were arguing for the redemptive power of domestic values and
therefore, by implication, for the crucial importance of female influ-
ence on society, what were women themselves doing? The answer,
of course, is that American women had been organizing for charitable
purposes since the early nineteenth century and thereby struggling
to achieve that influence. It is beyond the scope of this work to go
into detail about the history of women's voluntary associations. None-
theless, it is important to review the outlines briefly, because activism
began when Republican Motherhood gave women an excuse for in-
volvement in affairs outside the home. That activism accelerated as
the cult of domesticity gained increasing stature and credibility. By
the late nineteenth century, women were routinely using the home
to justify their claims for influence, in particular, their demands to
control male drinking behavior.
In fact, a number of religious, social, and educational factors—in
addition to the new political role for mothers—were conducive to
female organization beginning in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth century. Several historians have pointed to the role of the Sec-
ond Great Awakening in creating a context for such activity. In con-
junction with the disestablishment of the churches, this outburst of
institution building around the new nation was so demanding that it

opened up opportunities for talented women. Although women were
not performing the clerical functions itself, they were the mainstays
of their congregations in other respects. In the words of Mary Beth
Norton:
The disestablishment of American churches in the 17805 and
17905 opened new pathways for the women who numerically
dominated the Protestant denominations. As the churches lost
their politically privileged positions and access to tax revenues,
they needed to generate new sources of funds, support, and
loyalty. That need helped promote the formation of voluntary
associations tied to individual churches; the earliest of these
were denominationally sponsored sewing circles or female chari-
table societies organized in New England in the last two de-
cades of the century. After the Second Great Awakening
(1790-1840), which brought even larger numbers of female
converts into Protestant churches, women's charitable and re-
form associations burgeoned, creating what historians of the
nineteenth century called "the benevolent empire."61
By the 18305, voluntary associations, male and female, had pro-

liferated to such an extent that Tocqueville dilated at some length
on the American propensity for forming them: "The Americans make
associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns,
to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the
antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons and schools.
If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by
the encouragement of a great example, they form a society."82 The
extraordinary geographic mobility of American society in these years,
a condition that promoted the home as a source of social cohesion,
also made Americans of both sexes feel compelled to come together
in groups outside the home. Yet women had a special role to play
because they were defined as uniquely capable of larger social sym-
pathies in a society dedicated in the main to individual self-better-
ment. Thus it was entirely appropriate for beings previously lacking
an extra-domestic role to organize for the relief of social problems.63
Linda Kerber has argued that the ideology of Republican Mother-
64 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
hood was most consequential for women in the way that it fostered
improved education. Suzanne Lebsock, in her recent study of the
women in one small town in Virginia, goes on to link improved fe-
male education with the founding of the first charitable institution
to be established by female effort, an asylum for orphaned girls that
came into being in 1812: "The best guess is that education made the
difference; the founding of the asylum marked the coming of age of
Petersburg's first generation of educated women."84
Thus Republican Motherhood enhanced the likelihood of female
activism outside the home both indirectly—improved education for
women—and directly—giving women a role in the civic culture. The
high status of the home also suggested that those closest to it would
be the most capable of generosity toward the unfortunate. These de-
velopments, together with the changes precipitated by the Second
Great Awakening and the diminution of the drudgery of housework
for middle-class housewives, created a new pattern of daily life for
thousands of women. Mary Ryan found that in Utica in the 18405,
for example, there were more than a dozen women's groups in a
small city of only 12,000 people.85 Although men were creating asso-
ciations, too, the women were the ones who were creating the benev-
olent empire. This, in turn, gave women a new political role:
During the nineteenth century, women expanded their ascribed
sphere into community service and care of dependents, areas
not fully within men's or women's politics. These tasks com-
bined public roles and administration with nurturance and
compassion. They were not fully part of either male electoral
politics and formal governmental institutions or the female
world of the home and family. Women made their most visible
public contributions as founders, workers, and volunteers in
social service organizations. Together with the social separa-
tion of the sexes and women's informal methods of influencing
politics, political domesticity provided the basis for a distinct
nineteenth-century women's political culture.88
That the ideology of domesticity also fostered social and political
activism by women because it enhanced female self-confidence is
clear. The domestic novel, with its images of the competent house-
wife, presented the female craft tradition in such a way as to promote

a sense of efficacy on the part of its women readers. That efficacy was
also promoted by the ringing endorsement of the value of women
and home from the pulpit. Political scientists consider the sense of
personal efficacy to be one of the most important variables explaining
levels of political integration.67 Thus it is not surprising to find the
newly self-confident women using the home, a home then represent-
ing the height of cultural value, to explain and justify their assump-
tion of an extra-domestic role. The women under discussion in this
chapter certainly fit this pattern. Finally, as early as the antebellum
period, Theodore Parker used the argument that the state needs the
involvement of housekeepers to justify woman suffrage. This fore-
shadowed a refrain that would be heard from many suffragists in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century, culminating in Jane
Addams's famous "municipal housekeeping" article in the Ladies
Home Journal in 1910.
Simply put, the epic style of domesticity empowered women both
inside and outside the home. Yet to speak of empowerment suggests
a corollary to this generalization: domesticity would become more
controversial as the century wore on because power won by one
group may well entail the loss of power and privilege by another.
Furthermore, after the sectional crisis ended, some of the political is-
sues galvanizing the nation resolved themselves into the politics of
gender, pitting men against women. In short, the interaction of do-
mestic feminism with the world outside the home generated a re-
markable history that has been insufficiently understood because
domesticity has been underestimated by most historians. That history
is the subject of the next chapter.
THREE
Domestic Feminism and the World

Outside the Home
D DOMESTIC FEMINISM, whether confined to the home or em-

bodied in female activism outside the home, always contained within
it the potential for engendering a strong sexual politics. In the first
place, some husbands no doubt resented a new self-confidence and
assertiveness on the part of their wives. What is more, at mid-century
the women's magazines propounded their own style of barely dis-
guised sexual politics. For example, even though Sarah Josepha Hale
refused to endorse woman suffrage, she was hardly apolitical. The
pages of Godey's frequently contained denunciations of male behav-
ior together with characterizations of female behavior as "sublime."
If one examines the themes of the best-selling novels of the domestic
writers, one again encounters, at least in some books, polarized values,
with the female characters representing all that is positive and the
male characters all that is negative. Nonetheless, it was not until
after the Civil War that the publicly expressed sexual politics reached
the level of adversary relations. With the ending of the sectional
crisis as well as the emancipation of the slaves, male and female re-
formers were no longer working together for the same cause in the
same way. Indeed, many women understandably felt betrayed by
their former male allies' refusal to link suffrage for women to the
66
THE WORLD OUTSIDE THE HOME 67
cause of suffrage for freedmen.1 Furthermore, in the late nineteenth

century women formed their own temperance society. This also pro-
moted polarization along gender lines because women claimed the
moral authority to control male drinking behavior—and did so on the
basis of the female role in the home. As we shall learn, domestic
feminism would survive into the twentieth century when it surfaced
as the "municipal housekeeping" argument for woman suffrage. This
chapter will examine the evolution of domestic feminism and assess
its impact on the status of domesticity in the culture at large.
Domestic feminism became overtly political because women re-
formers began to launch attacks on aspects of male culture in the
name of their own higher virtue.2 In fact, attacks on male culture
began to appear in some of the best-selling women's novels as early
as the antebellum period.3 By examining the themes of certain of
these novels we can gain an insight into the sources of the sexual
politics that would find full-blown expression in the temperance
movement of the late nineteenth century.
Antebellum women novelists knew that the home provided their
protagonists with the most secure basis for power in an insecure and
male-dominated world. We have already become acquainted with
the tyrannical Aunt Fortune in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide
World. Warner says of Aunt Fortune: "The ruling passion of this
lady was thrift; her next, good housewifery. First, to gather to herself
and heap up of what the world most esteems; after that to be known
as the most thorough housekeeper and the smartest woman in Thirl-
wall."4 Aunt Fortune has a house that is immaculate and over which
she enjoys absolute control. When she falls ill and is temporarily bed-
ridden, she tries to dictate the terms under which she can receive
help, telling her niece Ellen, for example, to let no one else into the
buttery. Sick though she is, Aunt Fortune insists that the sick room—
which is the one room whose maintenance she can still directly
supervise—be kept spotless: "Every rung of every chair must be gone
over, though ever so clean; every article put up or put out of the way;
Miss Fortune made the most of the little province of housekeeping
that was left her."5 Warner thus gives an excellent demonstration of
why the nineteenth-century woman vested so much importance in
68 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
her home: she could exert control over a physical environment and
in so doing go a long way toward controlling the behavior of other
people. The glorified home of the nineteenth century commanded a
new respect, even from men, relative to earlier periods of American
history, and this gave housewives the leverage to enforce their own
standards.
In one of her Christopher Crowfield articles, articles that originally
appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harriet Beecher Stowe sets forth
a fictitious conversation between two men on the subject of an overly
fussy housewife. A harassed husband describes his household to
Crowfield in these terms: "Now, you see, Chris, my position is a
delicate one, because Sophie's folks all agree that if there's anything
in creation that is ignorant and dreadful and mustn't be allowed his
way anywhere, it's a man."8 Although Stowe was exaggerating for
effect, there is a residue of truth to this passage. The cult of domes-
ticity might well have given a woman power over her husband in just
this fashion. As Mary Ryan puts it, "A father in a Victorian parlor
was something of a bull in a China shop, somewhat ill at ease with
the gentle virtues enshrined there."7
Emma D. E. N. Southworth was a novelist who well knew the
value of the domestic sphere in enhancing female power, a cause in
which she fervently believed. One of the most prolific and popular
novelists of the nineteenth century, Southworth had been left to
support herself and two small children because of her husband's
abandonment, and thus wrote out of urgent necessity and with no
great love for the male sex.8 Given her own experiences and her in-
sight into the value of home as a counterweight to male values, it is
not surprising to find Southworth displaying sensitivity to the politi-
cal uses of domesticity in her novel, The Deserted Wife.
The action begins in Maryland. Early in the proceedings we are
introduced to Heath Hall, a cold, comfortless, and neglected man-
sion, as well as to a number of flamboyant characters who comprise
the protagonists in a novel that clearly owes much to the Gothic
tradition. Hagar, the orphaned heroine, is virtually as neglected as
Heath Hall. Lacking the usual supervision a girl would have had in
1850, Hagar grows up untamed. Having fallen in love, she nonethe-
less marries reluctantly because she intuits that marriage will mean
a loss of freedom:
It was curious; her very name and tide were gone, and the
girl, two minutes since a wild, free maiden was now little better
than a bondwoman; and the gentle youth who two minutes
since might have sued humbly to raise the tips of her little
dark fingers to his lips, was now invested with a life-long au-
thority over her.9
Once married, Hagar accompanies her husband to his family home

in the north. There, we see another perverted version of the domestic
ideal. Her husband tells Hagar that he wants her to be merely an
ornament—no pantry smells or household cares for her: "You have
nothing to do with house, love, cultivate your beauty." Before long
he is cruelly mistreating her. Eventually he sails off to Europe with
another woman.
Abandoned, Hagar returns to Maryland with her twin daughters
and newborn son. Immediately, she begins to feel a return of the
vitality she had lost because of her husband's mistreatment. "She was
at home, under her own roof; what if the house were half a ruin—it
was HER OWN. She was upon her own land, and though it was
only a desert heath, it was HER OWN."10 But Heath Hall does not
remain a ruin for long. Hagar becomes an internationally renowned
singer and uses her new wealth to rebuild her ancestral home. Once
she has accomplished this, renaming her home "Alto Rio," her hus-
band returns—on her terms. The restored domestic sphere, restored
by Hagar's own efforts and energy, is thus the direct means by
which the heroine reestablishes her life. Moreover, it is the means
by which she establishes control over her errant husband.11
This new openness about female striving for control, best evi-
denced by the appearance of the woman suffrage movement and the
married woman's property movement in the same years, was bound
to generate divided feelings for many women. A best-seller from the
18605, Augusta Evans's St. Elmo reveals a profoundly ambivalent
attitude toward the assertion of female power. Edna Earl, yet another
orphaned heroine, is fortunate enough to be adopted by a wealthy
70 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
widow whose son, St. Elmo, is one of the most extreme misogynists
to be encountered in the domestic novels. As Edna matures and de-
velops into an intellectual of formidable proportions, St. Elmo is at-
tracted to her, but sneers constantly at women in general and at
literary women in particular: "I should really enjoy seeing them tied
down to their spinning wheels and gagged with their own books,
magazines, and lectures."
It is Edna's combination of ferocious ambition with stubborn re-
fusal to endorse suffrage that reveals Evans's own divided mind about
female power. Edna aspires not merely to be a literary woman but
also to be a philosopher. Toward that end she learns Greek and
Hebrew. Yet there is one scene in which she is depicted as mending
her mentor's clothes. Her first book is a philosophical treatise—which
meets with a stunning success, naturally—but her second is entitled
"Shining Thrones of the Hearth" and has as its aim "to discover the
only true and allowable and womanly sphere of feminine work." On
the one hand, Edna quotes John Stuart Mill approvingly. On the
other hand, she voices her dismay about Mill's endorsement of
woman suffrage, calling it "this most loathesome of political lepro-
sies." Evans explains Edna's purpose as follows:
Believing that the intelligent, refined, modest Christian women
of the United States were the real custodians of national
purity, and the sole agents who could successfully arrest the
tide of demoralization breaking over the land, she addressed
herself to the wives, mothers and daughters of America. . . .
Jealously she contended for every woman's right which God
and nature had decreed the sex. The right to be learned, wise,
noble, useful, in women's divinely limited sphere; the right to
influence and exalt the circle in which she moved . . . the
right to modify and direct her husband's opinions.12
After achieving an international success as an author, while yet stay-
ing within carefully defined bounds, Edna retires to marry the now-
reformed St. Elmo, presumably to live happily ever after and, if St.
Elmo's directions are obeyed, never to write again. Evans thus tries
to create a situation in which her heroine can have the best of both
worlds.
THE WORLD OUTSIDE THE HOME Jl
But even while trying to set limits to Edna's achievements and to

keep her grounded in domesticity, Evans manages to create a heroine
who is so independent and autonomous that she would have been
unthinkable a generation earlier. To compare Mrs. Barclay of Home
with Edna Earl is instructive. Neither is agitating for suffrage, but,
unlike Mrs. Barclay, who spends her time "directing domestic affec-
tions," Edna sets her own course, has intellectual aspirations the
equal of a man's, and shows only a token interest in the activities
centered in the home. The domestic novel thus changed in thirty
years from a vehicle for exhortation and pious example to a genre
whose heroines could barely be contained within conventional roles;
in short, to a highly politicized genre—and this despite an individual
novelist's misgivings about female striving for power.13
To read issues of Godey's from the 18505 and 18605 is to encounter
similar attempts to chart a course for women, a course that would be
independent and yet stop short of encroaching on the male sphere. In
an "Editor's Table" of March 1852, for example, Sarah Josepha Hale
said the following:
Give women some pursuit which men esteem and see if their
work is not well done, provided they are suitably trained. Now
we do not desire to change the station of the sexes, or give
to women the work of men. We only want our sex to become
fitted for their own sphere. But we believe this comprises,
besides household care and domestic duties, three important
vocations. . . .
She then went on to enumerate not only teaching but also preserving
and helping, under which rubric she included a call for women
physicians. She went even further the following year, saying that
any indoor employment would be akin to home and thus appropriate
for a woman who has to support herself, and pointing out that Louis
Godey employed eighty-eight female operatives in the different de-
partments of the Lady's Book, not including the editor and the
women contributors.14
In a book published in 1868, Manners or Happy Homes and Good
Society All the Year Round, Hale gave an endorsement of female
72 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
nature and a prescription for male responsibilities. Those who read

and reflect on the Bible will soon realize that God put special care
into the creation of woman, she argued. "Woman was the crown of
all" because she is superior in spiritual qualities.15 If the Bible says
"Honor her as the weaker vessel," this means to take care of and
appreciate her as one would fine porcelain rather than rough clay. A
husband has an obligation to "bring home smiles and sunshine" if
he is to be worthy of the woman he married.16
Thus the new roles for the home and the new female activism
generated both a heady sense of possibilities and uneasiness, some-
times coexisting in the same person. Whether going so far as to ad-
vocate suffrage or not, many women were challenging the status quo
and making wholly unprecedented claims for female influence. If we
examine one reform-minded household in particular, that of Julia
Ward Howe (1819-1910) and Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876),
we can see the ramifying effects of the new situation on a marriage.
In this instance each party understood full well what domesticity had
to do with power. A man with a national reputation for his humani-
tarian undertakings, particularly in the area of the education of the
deaf, Samuel Howe was reluctant to share power with his wife and
jealous of the fame she achieved with "The Battle Hymn of the
Republic." Early in their marriage he insisted on hiring the servants
himself, once dismissing the entire staff while his wife was out of
town. Moreover, he tried to achieve control over the education of
both sons and daughters, in opposition to the claims by Catharine
Beecher and others that education should properly be assigned to
woman's sphere.17
For her part, Julia Howe, sensible of the utility of domesticity for
justifying female claims, advised young girls in her autobiography
to learn all they could about running a household before marriage so
that they would not feel inadequate once married. It is easy to infer
from her confession of her own inadequacy as a bride how much she
was placed at a disadvantage vis-a-vis her husband by a combination
of her ignorance and her youth.18 But a growing competence inside
the home and her achievements outside it changed all this, and she
began to hold her own. Shortly before his death and after his wife
had become nationally celebrated, Samuel Howe complained to a

friend, "Mrs. Howe grows more and more absorbed in the public
work of obtaining woman's suffrage; and, like most of her co-workers,
shows more zeal than discretion; and, in my opinion, does more
harm by subordinating domestic duties to supposed public ones."19
That she continued to ground such public activities in the home as a
power base for women is clear, however. She explained the dynamics
of what the twentieth century has called "domestic feminism" as
follows: "But surely, no love of intellectual pursuits should lead any
of us to disparage and neglect the household gifts and graces. A
house is a kingdom in little and its queen, if she is faithful, gentle
and wise, is a sovereign indeed."20
If some women had reason to view the private relationship of
marriage in adversarial terms, others were learning considerable dis-
trust of men in the public realm, too, in the postbellum years. By
mid-century a well-developed woman's movement had come into
being, with suffrage and property rights for married women as the
two most pressing issues. Although women no doubt outnumbered
men in the movement, both sexes frequently worked together be-
cause of the pervasive and inclusive reform culture of the period, a
culture that encompassed both abolition and rights for women. But
the politics of Reconstruction produced a schism in the woman's
movement, with almost all male abolitionists and some female ones
taking the position that the vote for black men must take precedence
over woman suffrage. Those women who disagreed with this posi-
tion, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony being the most
prominent, did so strongly and were profoundly discouraged about
the setback to their cause. Indeed, the exclusion of women from full
citizenship was made even more explicit by the use of the word
"male" in the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to
freedmen. As a result Stanton and Anthony formed a new suffrage
organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association, a group
that excluded men from participation.21
The new, women-only group was symptomatic of an important
change in the United States. What happened in the years after the
Civil War was a collision between antagonistic male and female cul-
74 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
tures, with the temperance movement as the major battleground.

Moreover, despite the schism, female culture held its own as effec-
tively as at any preceding time in American history because of the
general esteem for the home.22 Even those men who wanted to dis-
miss female-centered values found this difficult to achieve. Indeed,
if there was tension in the writings of some women between the
assertion of autonomy and the assertion of conventional views of
woman's sphere, this was echoed by tension in the writing of certain
men between reverence for the home and rebellion against it.
No male writer of the period better demonstrates this tension than
Mark Twain, and the tension is manifest in more than one novel. In
fact, it is not too much to say that his complicated and ambivalent
feelings about domesticity were a major theme of Twain's work.
That Samuel Clemens was born in 1835 and came to maturity during
the very years when the cult of domesticity was at its height may
explain this phenomenon.
The family, genteel but poor, lived in a raw little village in
Missouri when Samuel Clemens was born. Judge Clemens died in
1847, and young Sam's formal education came to a close the follow-
ing year. After working at a variety of jobs which included journal-
ism and piloting a boat on the Mississippi River, Clemens headed
west for a stint as a journalist in Nevada and California. Much of
his early writing, including "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Cala-
veras County" and Roughing It, drew upon the experiences he had
in the rough-and-tumble gold country. Further, he enjoyed cultivat-
ing the image of being anti-establishment and more than slightly out-
rageous in these years.
Yet when he fell in love in his early thirties, he fell in love with a
woman who represented all the values he was flouting. While on a
European trip, he met a young man from a prosperous, upstate New
York family, who possessed an ivory miniature of his sister. Clemens
subsequently sought the sister out, fell in love, and courted her
assiduously. Olivia Langdon was young, beautiful, deeply conven-
tional, and "pure as snow" in her lover's eyes. At one point during
their engagement, he was horrified to learn that she was reading
Don Quixote, which he regarded as too coarse for her pure mind,
whose purity he was eager to preserve.23 Says one of Clemens's biog-

raphers, Justin Kaplan, "He courted her by offering in all sincerity to
make over his character and habits to suit her standards."24 Shortly
after their marriage, he wrote to a friend, "Before the gentle majesty
of her purity all evil things and evil ways and evil deeds stand
abashed,—then surrender."25
Not only did he marry a woman who represented the genteel cul-
ture at its most genteel, but also he demonstrated his affinity for do-
mesticity by the house he built in Hartford when his writing success
enabled him to construct a temple to his own prosperity. In his youth
a wanderer whose adventures could and did furnish the material for
a picaresque novel, he relished the palatial residence at Nook Farm,
and even became involved in its design and decoration.26 Although
he grumbled about the effort required, he kept tight control of such
matters. Moreover, the domestic side of Samuel Clemens is revealed
by his fondness for his three daughters. The magnificent Hartford
house clearly represented his desire to give them an idyllic childhood,
in addition to being a monument to Mark Twain's ego.
Yet the chronicle of a rough westerner tamed and domesticated by
his love for his wife and family is only part of the story. Clemens
never lost his enjoyment of being outrageous, a trait that could mani-
fest itself in diverse ways such as trying to sneak a dubious passage
in his book past the censor (his wife) or playing the role of the
perpetual bad boy in his own household—or even in the households
of close friends. As Susan K. Harris argues in her book, Mark
Twain's Escape from Time, "home" provided two functions for
Clemens: it was at once his haven and his prison, thus giving him
something to rebel against.27 Another way of putting this might be
that he voluntarily submitted to his wife's authority with respect to
standards of behavior and then resented the yoke.
That resentment came quickly to the surface in his hymn to boy-
hood, Tom Sawyer, published in 1876. The book, set in a thinly
disguised version of Clemens's hometown of Hannibal, opens with
an assertion of female authority over a male: Aunt Polly is searching
for her mischievous charge and calls out "Tom!" The reader soon
learns that Tom and Aunt Polly love each other deeply, but that
j6 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
Tom cannot forswear mischief for any length of time. Indeed, Clem-
ens seems to be saying that it is a boy's nature to be mischievous, and
that there is something suspect about one, such as Tom's younger
brother Sid, who conforms to female standards.
Tom himself is far from impervious to the female sex, however.
He reveals Aunt Polly's most powerful weapon in a conversation
with a friend: "She! She never licks anybody—whacks 'em over the
head with her thimble—and who cares for that I'd like to know. She
talks awful, but talk don't hurt—anyways it don't if she don't cry."28
If Aunt Polly's tears give Tom pause, he is completely disarmed by
his love for Becky Thatcher, a love that motivates much of the action
in the novel. When Becky temporarily rejects him, for example, he
briefly runs away from home.
Tom, the naughty boy who is nonetheless the joy of his aunt's
heart, is contrasted with Huckleberry Finn, the town outcast who
need answer to no mother, aunt, or female guardian. Huck comes
and goes as he pleases, never goes to school or to Sunday school and
hence epitomizes freedom: "In a word, everything that goes to make
life precious that boy had. So thought every harassed, hampered,
respectable boy in St. Petersburg."29 Both Tom and Huck enjoy ad-
venture, but there are decided differences in their approaches to life
because of Huck's inexperience with female standards. For example,
during an episode involving Injun Joe, the villain, Tom "borrows" a
towel from his aunt (to be used to muffle the light) and sneaks into
a room where Injun Joe lies sleeping. Having to flee for his life,
Tom later recounts the experience to Huck:
"I just grabbed that towel and started!"

"I'd never 'a' thought of the towel, I bet!"
"Well, I would. My aunt would make me mighty sick if I
lost it."30
Tom is brave enough to risk his life in order to defeat the evil Injun
Joe but not so foolhardy as to push his aunt beyond her limits, at
least on this occasion.
We also find out how much "home" means to Tom and his friends
when they run away to Jackson Island to be pirates. They have a

glorious time in the wild for a short period, but then all of them,
even Huck, begin to long for St. Petersburg and all of their everyday
comforts. After a few days they sneak back for their own funeral, are
reassured to find out how much they are loved, and then reveal them-
selves to the startled congregation.
That Tom Sawyer is Clemens's persona is clear. Another episode
in the book, Tom's brief tenure in the Cadets of Temperance, is
clearly autobiographical and reveals the author's feelings about for-
bidden behavior. Having joined the cadets so as to be in a parade,
"Tom soon found himself tormented with a desire to drink and
swear." After this experiment ends, "Tom was a free boy again. . . .
He could drink and swear, now—but found to his surprise that he
did not want to. . . ."31
The book ends happily with Tom and Huck defeating Injun Joe
and finding a lost treasure. But for Huck, this victory is not an un-
alloyed delight. He has redeemed himself from his outcast status and
must suffer the consequences:
Huck Finn's wealth and the fact that he was now under the
widow Douglas's protection [he had prevented an attack on
her] introduced him into society—no, dragged him into it,
hurled him into it—and his sufferings were almost more than
he could bear. The widow's servants kept him clean and
neat. . . . He had to eat with knife and fork . . . whither-
soever he turned the bars and shackles of civilization shut him
in and bound him hand and foot.
He bravely bore his miseries three weeks and then one day
turned up missing.32
Tom tracks him down and talks him into going back to the widow's
by promising that the boys will form a gang of robbers.
Because gender has been so neglected a category of scholarly analy-
sis, most interpretations of Twain's work emphasize only the tension
between the solitary individual and the society and, although this is
surely an important element, they ignore what his work has to say
about home and specifically female standards. The "domestic" inter-
78 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
pretation is borne out by the fact that grown-up men who are not
villains or buffoons are almost entirely lacking from Tom Sawyer.
(Judge Thatcher is a sympathetic male character in the novel, but
he lives outside of town.) Samuel Clemens was evidently trying to
come to terms with female authority himself, and that is the crux of
the matter for Tom and Huck. How much sacrifice of male inde-
pendence is home comfort worth? If women give emotional content
to life, what do they exact in return?
The answer to these questions is different in Huckleberry Finn.
Published in 1885 but in gestation for a number of years, Clemens's
masterpiece reflects a much more pessimistic view of the human con-
dition than had the relatively sunny Tom Sawyer. There is no Becky
Thatcher for Huck, no female figure to make the sacrifice of inde-
pendence worthwhile. Huck, according to T. S. Eliot the most soli-
tary figure in fiction, therefore rejects home and most of human
society in his effort to be untrammeled.33
Written in the first person, the book begins with a paragraph ex-
plaining that Mark Twain wrote about Huck in Tom Sawyer and
only lied a little: "I never seen anybody but lied, one time or an-
other, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary
[Tom's cousin]." Here again we encounter women as the moral ex-
emplars. And how successful they are at inculcating their values!
Early on, Huck, Tom, and their friends are discussing the ground
rules for the robbers' gang they hope to set up. One boy suggests that
Sunday would be a good day for their operations since he can usually
get out on Sundays, "but all the boys said it would be wicked to do
it on Sunday, and that settled the thing."
The important female characters in Tom Sawyer are benign if
troublesome. In Huckleberry Finn we are introduced to Miss Wat-
son, of whom this cannot be said. Sister of the widow Douglas, she
is a mean-spirited scold—unlike the widow, whose reaction to mis-
behavior is to look, according to Huck, "so sorry that I thought I
would behave for a while if I could." Because Miss Watson repre-
sents entirely negative authority, as does Huck's cruel and drunken
father, Huck sets off on a raft down the Mississippi in the company
of Jim, an escaping slave. (It should be pointed out that Jim is es-
caping from Miss Watson, too, because she has talked of selling him
down the river.)
In the context of this book the most significant of their many ad-
ventures is the encounter with the Grangerford family. Only a man
who was thoroughly familiar with the "house beautiful" literature as
epitomized in the book of that title by Clarence Cook could have
written the passage about the Grangerford house.34 Indeed the de-
scription of the house is so precise and so vivid that it recalls some
of Stowe's descriptions of interiors and partakes of the same "genre"
quality:
It was a mighty nice family, and a mighty nice house, too. I

hadn't seen no house out in the country before that was so
nice and had so much style. . . . There was a big fireplace
that was bricked on the bottom, and the bricks was kept clean
and red by pouring water on them and scrubbing them with
another brick. . . . There was a clock on the middle of the
mantel-piece, with a picture of a town painted on the bottom
half of the glass front, and a round place in the middle of it
for the sun, and you could see the pendulum swing behind
it. ...Well, there was a big outlandish parrot on each side
of the clock . . . [the] table had a cover made out of beauti-
ful oil-cloth, with a red and blue spread-eagle painted on
it, and a painted border all around. It come all the way from
Philadelphia, they said.
. . . And warn't the cooking good, and just bushels of it,
too!35
A few details, such as the parrot, tip the reader off to the satirical
intent. We soon learn that the Grangerfords, who have created a
beautiful and gracious home and who are the soul of hospitality to
Huck, are engaged in a murderous feud with another family, the
Shepherdsons. Even the women, with one exception, are blood-
thirsty: "Miss Charlotte she held her head up like a queen while
Buck was telling his tale [of an encounter with a Shepherdson] and
her nostrils spread and her eyes snapped." After a massacre, Huck
and Jim make their way back to the raft: "I was powerful glad to get
away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp.
80 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do
seem cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel might free
and easy and comfortable on a raft."38
In essence, Clemens is suggesting that home may be a fraud, that
the comfort may be merely on the surface. It is worth contrasting the
passage above with the climactic speech of Clifford Pyncheon in
The House of the Seven Gables, a speech similarly rejecting the
value of home. When Clifford rants that the railroad can free people
from the prison of home, Hawthorne clearly intends the reader to
apprehend that this is a personality on the verge of disintegration.
In the instance of Huck, Clemens gives tacit approval to the notion
that a raft makes the ideal home.
Tom Sawyer ends with Huck's captivity in the home of the
Widow Douglas. Huckleberry Finn ends with Huck's departure for
territories unknown: "But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory
ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and
sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before." This passage
is an ironic echo of the plea from young Samuel Clemens to his
fiancee, "You will break up all my irregularities when we are mar-
ried, and civilize me .. won't you?"37
Yet Huck's rejection of home and female standards is not Clem-
ens's last word on the subject. Perhaps his most poignant tribute to
the value of wife and home appears in A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur's Court, published in 1889. Hank Morgan finds himself
in Camelot and quickly uses Yankee know-how and nineteenth-
century technology to win a place for himself in the kingdom. He is
nonetheless an outsider in the society. Only his marriage to Sandy, a
young woman with whom he has gone knight-erranting, and the
birth of their daughter relieve his loneliness. In the words of Susan
K. Harris, "A non-conformist in all societies, and constantly fighting
to master his situation in the public sphere, Hank finds repose only
in the figures of wife and child and the tiny community they repre-
sent."38 Dying in the nineteenth century, Hank calls out "O, Sandy,
you are come at last—how I have longed for you!"
Evidently, Clemens never lost his reverence for feminine values
even while he chafed under the restrictions they placed on his free-
dom. He craved female affection and could occasionally display al-

most maudlin sentimentality with respect to women. Late in life, for
example, he returned to Hannibal for a nostalgic voyage into the
past. Speaking to a local club, he broke into tears when he touched
on the subject of his mother.39 What makes the corpus of his work
so valuable for the study of the impact of domestic feminism is the
fact that he felt and expressed both reverence for and resentment of
the home and female standards with such intensity—to say nothing
of literary artistry.
When we turn to the work of his contemporaries and imitators we
see much less ambivalence about female standards as well as much
less artistry. In fact, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn belonged
to what has been called a "bad-boy sub-genre." Most of the authors
who wrote in this vein displayed more crudely anti-woman and anti-
domestic attitudes than did Clemens. At a time when the home em-
powered women to make large claims for cultural influence, male
authors evidently found it difficult to attack domesticity using the
persona of a full-grown man. Therefore many of them "acted out"
their rebellion in descriptions of a rebellious, but lovable, boy.
The scholarly consensus holds that the sub-genre was invented by
Benjamin P. Shillaber with his stories of the widowed Mrs. Parting-
ton and her mischievous nephew Ike. Shillaber's sketches had origi-
nally appeared in the Boston Post and then came out in book form in
1854. The book begins with a brief biography of Mrs. Partington,
emphasizing her goodheartedness and her domestic skills in addition
to her propensity for malapropisms. The reader is then introduced to
eleven-year-old Ike: "He is as merry a boy as you will find any day,
and though a little tricky and mischievous, the first beginning of
malice doesn't abide with him."40 The rest of the book consists of vig-
nettes featuring Ike's pranks and Mrs. Partington's various torturings
of the English language. Although we laugh at her, we are clearly
meant to love her too, for her generosity and innocence.
The next significant development was the publication of Thomas
Bailey Aldrich's The Story of a Bad Boy in 1869. "This is the story
of a bad boy. Well, not such a very bad, but a pretty bad boy. . . ."
Aldrich says that the young hero is not really vicious but that he de-
82 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
serves the title of bad boy because he is no story-book angel. Whether

the author thinks that Tom Bailey is vicious or not, some of his
pranks are cruel. For instance, he has an enemy at school, Bill Con-
way. Tom and his friends notice that Bill's widowed mother, a seam-
stress, is enamored of a young druggist whose mother she might have
been: "The lady's fondness and the gentleman's blindness, were
topics ably handled at every sewing-circle in the town. . . . We
disliked the widow not so much for her sentimentality as for being
the mother of Bill Conway; we disliked Mr. Meeks, not because he
was insipid . . . but because the widow loved him. . . ." Late one
night the boys sneak in and put a sign in the druggist's window,
"Wanted, a Sempstress!" thereby rendering her the laughing-stock of
the town.41
In the late 18705 and the 18805 the bad-boy books proliferated, and
at the same time many of them descended to the level of burlesque.
In Ike Partington (1879) Benjamin Shillaber dispenses with tributes
to Mrs. Partington's good nature and gets right down to the business
of making her look foolish. Moreover, he explains that Ike's mischief
has won him a bad reputation in town but that Ike is heedless of
this fact: 'Who ever knew a boy that was morbidly sensitive or cared
a continental copper what people said about him. He lives in a
world of his own."42 In truth, this passage has a certain "whistling
past the graveyard" quality, as if Shillaber were trying to convince
himself of a boy's fundamental imperviousness to community pres-
sure. (Conversely, Clemens's genius consisted of being able to show
how deeply sensitive his "bad boys" were to the opinion of the com-
munity while at the same rime needing to make independent moral
choices.)
With George Peck and Peck's Bad Boy, we come to a series of
books that can only be called misogynist. One of the books opens
with the bad boy explaining how he bedevils his father:
"How do you and your Pa get along now?" asked the
grocery-man of the bad boy. . . .
"Oh, I don't know. He don't seem to appreciate me. What
he ought to have is a deaf and dumb boy, with only one leg,
and both arms broke—then he could enjoy a quiet life."
If Pa is infuriated by the bad boy, he is also intrigued by his tricks,

however. When the boy squirts Pa in the face with his trick bou-
tonniere, Pa borrows it to take to a church social:
"I never seen Pa more kitteny than he was that night. He
filled the bulb with ice water and the first one he got to smell
of his button-hole bouquet was an old maid who thinks Pa is a
heathen, but she likes to be made something of by anybody
that wears pants, and when Pa sidled up to- her and began
talking about what a great work the Christian wimmen of the
land were doing in educating the heathen, she felt real good,
and then she noticed pa's posey in his button-hole and she
touched it, and then she reached over her beak to smell of it.
Pa he squeezed the bulb, and about half a teacupful of water
struck her right in the nose, and some went into her strangle
place, and 0, My didn't she yell."43
The bad-boy books, then, present young males who not only defy
female authority but also are depicted as virtually immune to it.
"Boys will be boys," after all. Contemporary with these books were
other depictions of boys, with a very different intent because they
were written by women. Indeed, the behavior of the young males in
books by women could not have been more dissimilar to the bad-boy
pattern.
One of the most famous fictional boys of the late nineteenth cen-
tury was Little Lord Fauntleroy in the book of the same name by
Frances Hodgson Burnett, published in 1886. Cedric Errol calls his
widowed mother "Dearest," and she calls him "my pretty little
Ceddie." (He is seven years old.) Described as having long golden
curls or "love-locks" and wearing black velvet with lace, Cedric
might seem rather effete, although Burnett does call him "a hand-
some, cheerful, brave little fellow." His conduct is so selfless as to
defy belief, however. An American who learns that he is heir to an
earldom and vast property, he thinks only of what he can do for
other people such as a family of twelve and an apple-woman. Ar-
riving in England, he redeems his heretofore selfish grandfather, the
Earl of Dorincourt, from his lonely, loveless existence. Indeed, Cedric
plays the same redemptive role as had countless other children in
84 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
earlier Victorian fiction—little Nell, little Eva—except they had usu-

ally been girls and had usually died.
A more realistic depiction of appropriate male behavior from a
woman's point of view is contained in Little Men by Louisa May
Alcott, a sequel to the much-loved Little Women. Published in 1871,
Little Men again takes up the story of the March family, centering
on tomboy Jo as a woman, her husband Professor Bhaer, and their
boys' school. At Plumfield the boys have pillow fights, and one young
scholar, Tommy Bangs, is the perpetrator of pranks that bear a re-
semblance to those of Tom Sawyer; in other words, he is no Cedric
Errol. Nonetheless, one of the most important lessons the boys must
learn at Plumfield is to respect women. When they come up short in
this regard, they must suffer heavy consequences, as the following
episode will demonstrate.
Aunt Jo, mother of two sons and with a school full of boys to care
for, also has charge of her niece Daisy. When the boys tell Daisy
that she cannot play football with them, Aunt Jo responds by buying
a little cook stove for Daisy, described so lovingly that it has been the
envy of generations of young readers. The stove gives Daisy status
in two ways: the boys admire the shiny new toy, and they want the
treats that Daisy turns out. Aunt Jo also invites another little girl,
Nan, to the school so that Daisy will not be so isolated. Some of the
boys misbehave at a "ball" given by the two girls, and the retaliation
is swift: they are forbidden from playing with the girls. Tommy pre-
tends not to miss the "stupid girls," but the others are bereft:
The others gave in very soon, and longed to be friends, for

now there was no Daisy to pet and cook for them, no Nan to
amuse and doctor them; and worst of all, no Mrs. Jo to make
home pleasant and life easy for them. To their affliction Mrs.
Jo seemed to consider herself one of the offended girls, for she
hardly spoke to the outcasts, looked as if she did not see them
when they passed, and was always too busy to attend to their
requests.44
What we have here is clearly a primer in sexual politics, with domes-

ticity as the chief female weapon.
In fact, what seems to have been occurring—although much more

research will be needed on what is, in effect, "men's history"—is that
both sexes were beginning to display more adversarial attitudes to-
ward one another than had been the case earlier in the century. A
brief glance at the culture of middle-class men in the late nineteenth
century reveals the following. A genre of fiction known as "bachelor
books" became popular, the best-known exemplar of which was
Reveries of a Bachelor by Donald Grant Mitchell (who wrote under
the pseudonym of Ik Marvel).45 These books extolled the pleasures
of the celibate life—a life in which women could be distanced or
controlled. In the 18705 a certain number of American men began
to subscribe to a belief in Social Darwinism with its emphasis on the
need for untrammeled and even brutal competition.48 In the 18905
there appeared a cult of the "strenuous life" best exemplified by the
writings of Theodore Roosevelt.47 In short, a self-consciously mascu-
line world was being created in which women played little or no
role.
If male and female cultures were in collision in the late nineteenth
century, no doubt the biggest single reason was the female attempt
to control male drinking behavior. There had, of course, been a
temperance movement in the antebellum period, but it had been
under male leadership. What was new about the Woman's Christian
Temperance Union that emerged in the 18705 was its all-female
constituency and leadership, paralleling that of the NWSA but with
a much larger membership. Those who founded the WCTU were
determined to be free of male influence. A letter to Frances Willard
in 1874 revealed the spirit of the group: "I send you today three
numbers—all that have been published—of The Golden Mean, a
journalistic crusader entirely originated and operated by—God over
us to be sure—but otherwise only by women. Our corps is one girl
printer and two lady editors and publishers, and we do everything
ourselves, even our own press work."48
In addition to its women-only policy, the WCTU was characterized
by a willingness to be confrontational. Originating in a series of cru-
sades in the Midwest in which heretofore shy and retiring house-
wives marched to saloons and gave highly charged speeches to their
86 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
proprietors, at its height this organization empowered thousands of

American women to be more outspoken in the public sphere. Strong
men quaked at the thought of an invasion of praying women because
the women would be drawing on the most sacred concepts in the
culture—"home" and "mother" to be exact—to justify their militancy.
Further, it must be noted that the WCTU organized women on a
wholly unprecedented scale. Within three months of the first anti-
liquor crusade with long-term consequences—that in Hillsboro, Ohio,
in December 1873—women had mounted offensives in more than
250 towns and cities.49 No less an observer than Mark Twain counted
3,000 victories in what he called the "rum sieges" within a year of the
Hillsboro crusade.50 So widespread was the involvement by women
that the temperance crusade assumed the character of a true mass
movement.51 Most significantly, it represented the fullest flowering
of domestic feminism: women used the home to justify extraordinary
departures from the usual norms of appropriate female conduct-
including the call for suffrage.
At first the WCTU refrained from endorsing suffrage and in fact
did not do so until 1881. Nonetheless, with the earliest crusade a
dynamic had been set in motion that would lead in that direction.
Mark Twain made the connection immediately. Crusading women
might or might not have a long-term impact on temperance, he con-
tended. Of that, no one could be sure. But more importantly, the
women's direct action, mounted in the absence of access to the ballot-
box, demonstrated courage and the likelihood that they would use
the ballot to advance public morality.52 Men would therefore be
forced to consider the potential benefits in granting women the vote.
Frances Willard, the WCTU's outstanding leader and the most
famous woman in the United States in the late nineteenth century,
denned her organization's goal succinctly: "Were I to define in a
sentence the thought and purpose of the Woman's Christian Tem-
perance Union, I would reply: It is to make the whole world Home-
like."63 Therefore it is not surprising that when the WCTU formally
endorsed woman suffrage, the call was for the "Home Protection"
ballot, a formulation that Willard had been urging for several years.
This was a masterly tactic because it neutralized the most powerful
THE WORLD OUTSIDE THE HOME 8/
weapon in the anti-suffrage arsenal—the idea that the public act of

voting was a violation of the divinely appointed domestic sphere of
woman—and suggested that women might be unable to defend their
homes without political rights.
The WCTU, then, was a movement that forced itself on the pub-
lic attention and similarly forced Americans to examine their as-
sumptions about appropriate female behavior, given the fact that
militants were often the wives of leading citizens in their respective
communities. Although there is no way of proving such an argument
conclusively, it seems likely that the bad-boy books constituted a
covert way of dealing with the male anxieties and hostilities trig-
gered by such a movement. Certainly, Mark Twain's presentation of
the dilemma faced by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn—How much loss
of freedom is home worth?—must have resonated in the minds of
many men. No doubt, the sexual politics of the late nineteenth cen-
tury also fed male fantasies about bachelorhood as a way of life or
about all-male activity in the great outdoors as preached most memo-
rably by Theodore Roosevelt.
The charged sexual politics set off by the women's crusades can
also be discerned in the temperance literature itself. One of the most
prolific authors of the nineteenth century was Timothy Shay Arthur,
a giver of domestic advice who today is known best for Ten Nights
in a Barroom. Within a few months of the Hillsboro crusade, Arthur
produced a fictionalized account of the event. Set in a small town in
Ohio, Woman to the Rescue depicts the efforts of the Widow Green
to rouse the other women in her community to combat the evils of
alcohol. Before long a band of praying women has visited all the
saloons in Delhi:
Our women are complete masters of the situation. They have

said to their husbands, fathers, sons, brothers and lovers,
"Stand off and give us fair play. Don't, after your failure of
years to limit or suppress a traffic the curse of which has driven
us to desperation, put in your bungling hands now. . . ." So
the women, for once in their lives, are to have their will in
Delhi. The ballot is now virtually in their hands, and the first
use of it will be to close the saloons.84
88 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
While the WCTU and its adherents were making perhaps the
most effective linkage between the home and power for women in
the public sphere, they were by no means alone in this endeavor.
Because political rights for women represented such a radical inno-
vation, it is not surprising that suffragists and their allies used what-
ever arguments they could muster to justify their plea. As early as
the 18505, Theodore Parker employed the "government as house-
keeping" analogy in a call for woman suffrage: "I know men say
woman cannot manage the great affairs of a nation. Very well. Gov-
ernment is political economy—national housekeeping. Does any re-
spectable woman keep house so badly as the United States?"55 Others
would continue this line of reasoning. In an article in the Woman's
Journal of February 5, 1870, for example, Uncle Sam is referred to
as an "old bachelor" whose appearance reveals his celibate state. In
fact, this is why "our national housekeeping is carried on in such a
slipshod manner." Votes for women will remedy the matter.58 Lucy
Stone extended the analogy to the level of local government. In an
article entitled "Extravagant Housekeeping," Stone deplored the
widespread indebtedness among Massachusetts cities and asserted,
"This is very bad housekeeping." Obviously, the solution would be
to give women the municipal suffrage.57
By the turn of the century the chorus of voices using the house-
keeping argument for suffrage had increased substantially. In addi-
tion to members of the WCTU and suffragist leaders, it included
certain Socialists as well as representatives of the new discipline of
home economics. Unless a mother takes an interest in such matters
as the regulation of trusts, "she is sadly neglecting her duties towards
her child, towards her husband, and towards her home," contended
Meta Berger, wife of the prominent Socialist leader, Victor Berger.58
Therefore the ballot is of prime importance for every mother. Such
a woman "will appropriate the ballot as a domestic necessity," pre-
dicted two pioneering home economists.59
No doubt the most influential presentation of the housekeeping
argument was made by Jane Addams in an article in the Ladies
Home Journal in 1910. By this time Frances Willard was dead, and
Addams, with her settlement house work at Hull House, had taken
Willard's place as the best-known woman in the country. What she

said on any subject—before, that is, she had the temerity to oppose
American entry into World War I—was taken seriously by hundreds
of thousands of her fellow Americans. This was especially true when
Addams addressed the subject of urban problems, the area of her
greatest expertise.
Simply put, Addams contended that the American city was in a
bad way precisely because it lacked "domesticity." The humblest
farm dwelling is more presentable than an urban landscape because
a woman is directly involved in its maintenance, she argued. In order
to redeem the city, even the most traditional women must begin to
understand their social responsibilities in the areas of hygiene, edu-
cation, child-labor legislation, and the like, responsibilities that can
only be met via political action.60 In effect, Addams set forth an am-
bitious agenda for Progressive reform, and in subsequent years
women would throw themselves into just these battles.
Thus domestic feminism was a vital part of the American political
landscape for decades. Arising in the antebellum period because the
valorization of home gave women a powerful new tool for legitimat-
ing their claims to cultural influence, it succeeded so well that it
generated what can only be called a backlash among male authors
in the late nineteenth century. These attacks notwithstanding,
women continued to use the home to serve their political purposes
until well into the twentieth century. One could argue that the
settlement-house movement itself, with its creative reform legacy,
was a working-out of domestic feminist visions because settlement
women sought to carry the values of home to slum-dwellers.
What needs to be addressed next is the issue of the negative as-
pects of a movement that had so many positive consequences for
women and for American society. The first point to be made in draw-
ing up a balance sheet is that there was nothing naive about using
the home to justify female activism. Rather, using the home was a
brilliant and hard-headed tactic. But domestic feminism was sounder
as a tactic than as a long-term strategy because it necessarily employed
arguments that took women away from the natural rights case for
female participation in public life and toward asymmetrical sex roles.
po JUST A HOUSEWIFE
Reformers themselves began to speak of the special qualities of

woman's nature—as sublime or motherly or unselfish—and to make
large claims for what those qualities could do to redeem American
political life. Perforce women had less ammunition to use against
those who claimed that women's special qualities might be negative-
such as lesser intellectual ability.
As we have seen, a few writers at mid-century had grappled with
a way of valuing the home without wedding this to asymmetrical sex
roles. But they were a tiny minority, too insignificant to constitute a
"movement" because the overwhelming majority of Americans clung
to deeply ingrained, if wholly unproven, assumptions about biologi-
cally determined male-female differences in character and ability.61
Hence, for all intents and purposes, valorization of the home was
closely allied with sexual asymmetry in the minds of both men and
women. As a corollary to the cult of domesticity, then, women were
able to feel a special self-righteousness because of the worth of their
divinely appointed sphere. It was this self-righteousness that gave
so many women the courage to break with tradition in their public
behavior.
Hence a balance sheet for domestic feminism must acknowledge
both positive and negative components of the movement. In effect,
it empowered women by enabling them to claim moral superiority.
But as the home changed, as domesticity declined in cultural value,
woman's moral nature, identified as different by women themselves,
could once again be trivialized as it had been in earlier periods of
American history.
In a speech entitled "The Province of Woman" (undated but
clearly pre-Civil War from the mention of slaves) Lucy Stone had
set forth a much different argument. Men and women are equal, she
asserted, quoting Genesis to prove her point. Women have the same
duty to speak out on public issues that men have. God gave woman
intellectual capacity and that implies a concomitant responsibility.
"Wherever there is a place to do good, there is woman's appropriate
sphere."62 It was this vision, a vision that neither invoked nor repu-
diated the value of home, that domestic feminism lost sight of.
Furthermore, there would be public issues of great moment, such
THE WORLD OUTSIDE THE HOME pi
as those in the area of foreign policy, that would lie outside the
boundaries of the housekeeping argument no matter how ingeniously
applied. By tying female participation in the polity to the home,
women risked their exclusion from such decisions as a declaration of
war, for example.
Finally, it is difficult to prove exactly how much the male writers'
attacks on home and female standards had to do with the eventual
devaluation of domesticity. That the two were related seems likely,
however. If Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and their kindred chafed so
memorably against the tyranny of the domestic ideal in the world
of fiction, they must surely have influenced their counterparts in the
real world—who were probably already feeling resentment about the
same thing. Politicizing the home and then turning this to female
advantage inevitably made enemies for domestic values, enemies who
would welcome a diminution in the sanctity of home.
FOUR
Toward an Industrialized Home
B "ECAUSE THE HOME had gained an array of new functions by

the early nineteenth century, a cult of domesticity came into being.
Because the home represented values antithetical to those of market
capitalism, domesticity fueled reform energies in the antebellum
years. Because the home enjoyed such esteem in the culture, women
could use it to justify their activism in the public sphere. But even
as the word "home" was being invoked by both men and women in
their pleas for various reforms in the late nineteenth century, its ca-
pacity to play this overarching role was being undermined: the insti-
tution of the American home itself was in rapid flux, and the society
that came into being during the Gilded Age made much of the con-
text for the ideology of domesticity obsolete. No doubt these changes
ultimately did more damage to the high esteem for domesticity than
did all the attacks by disaffected men that we read about in the last
chapter, although these attacks made the sanctity of the home less
of a social given.
Fundamental to the high status of domesticity in Jacksonian Amer-
ica had been a tissue of assumptions that scholars have called repub-
licanism, a blend of religious and political precepts. To subscribe to
this world-view meant believing in the individual's efficacy, not only
92
TOWARD AN INDUSTRIALIZED HOME 93
to direct his or her own life but also to contribute to the national
well-being by being a good citizen. Of course, there were many
Americans for whom this was myth, pure and simple, because their
lives were directed by economic forces beyond their control. But in
the absence of powerful organizations—such as the corporation—the
myth held enough reality to command allegiance from hundreds of
thousands of Americans. According to republican ideals, sturdy, in-
dependent male citizens were the backbone of the country, but so,
too, were Republican Mothers because they socialized the next gen-
eration to the duties of good citizenship. As we have seen, each home
became an essential unit in the larger pattern of the national com-
munity.1
By the late nineteenth century an ideology that rested on the indi-
vidual's capacity to direct his or her own fate was a bitter joke to
many Americans. If they still subscribed to republican ideas, it was
a greatly transformed republicanism, relative to that which had ex-
isted in the antebellum years. Big railroads, big steel, big oil, big
finance all changed the scale of doing business in the United States.
Entrepreneurs scrambled to find new ways of consolidating their
industries so as to avoid ruinous competition. In response, workers
joined groups based on class interests. Farmers came together in
various alliances and eventually in the Populist party. Professionals,
too, formed organizations to defend their interests. What many of
the new groups had in common was fear: fear of the rapacious eco-
nomic order, fear of social unrest unleashed by those who were the
victims of rapid change. To cling to the redemptive power of home
under these circumstances would have seemed like a sentimental
evasion.
The pervasive middle-class anxiety about the new urban-industrial
society found its most significant expression in Edward Bellamy's
Looking Backward, a book that spawned a short-lived movement
called Nationalism and inspired numerous imitations. One of the
best-selling novels of its era, Looking Backward deals with the ad-
ventures of Julian West, a man born in 1857, who wakes up one day
to find that he is in the year 2000. This plot device then allows Bel-
lamy to criticize his own world of the late i88os as well as to de-
94 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
scribe an ideal society. The tone alternates between sunny optimism

when Julian West learns about the future and nightmarish horror
when he deals with the Boston of 1887, with its entrenched inequal-
ities, cutthroat competition, and widespread strikes.
For our purposes, Looking Backward is valuable as a means of
documenting the fact that many Americans were interested in re-
thinking the nature of the household in response to changes in their
world. The individual householder and his wife could no longer be
held up as the saving element in society; hence the good home could
not readily play the role envisioned by Emerson, Catharine Beecher,
and others in an earlier day. Given this, the problem became one of
determining how the home could be organized to promote the maxi-
mum efficiency and productivity of each of its inhabitants, a very
different matter indeed from seeing it as the source of transcendent
values. Bellamy clearly spoke to the interests of many when he de-
scribed a new set of arrangements.
To Julian West's wondering amazement, he learns that the twen-
tieth-century United States is organized into industrial armies, one
of men and one of women. People serve for a set number of years,
and each adult has a credit card, thereby eliminating the need for a
circulating medium or for wages. Homes are simple and modest, and
housework has all but disappeared, thereby eliminating the need for
domestic servants. Clothes are washed in public laundries, and meals
are cooked in public kitchens. In short, a woman is free from house-
hold drudgery. The imagination and care lavished on the private
household in the nineteenth century have been diverted to spaces
and buildings dedicated to public life.
One of the most telling conversations between Julian West and his
twentieth-century host, Dr. Leete, concerns the arrangements for
social welfare in the new society. Julian queries his host about those
who are too weak or infirm to make any genuine contribution to the
industrial army. Dr. Leete explains that there is no such concept as
charity because there is no such concept as self-support:
"Who is capable of self support?" he demanded. "There is no
such thing in a civilized society as self support. . . . As men
grow more civilized, and the subdivision of occupations and
services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence becomes

the universal rule. Every man, however solitary may seem his
occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as
large as the nation, as large as humanity."2
Clearly, this view of society is a long way from that of early
nineteenth-century republicanism. Bellamy is still profoundly influ-
enced by the Protestant tradition, still seeking redemption, but he
finds it only in the nature of social arrangements and not in the
hearts of individual men and women or in the homes they create.
By the late nineteenth century, then, the home was losing its
transcendent role. It still attracted the attention of thoughtful Ameri-
cans of both sexes, but for more purely material and practical reasons
than had been the case in the antebellum years. And indeed the
institution of the home itself was changing so rapidly that it is not
surprising to find that people were trying to rethink the nature of
household organization.3
At the top of the agenda for change, the "servant problem" was
absorbing an unprecedented amount of time and attention in the
late nineteenth century, principally because by this time domestics
tended to be drawn from the ranks of despised immigrant groups,
especially the Irish (except in the South, where servants were black).
A brief overview of the history of domestic service would show the
following stages. In the colonial period servants were usually in-
dentured; hence there was a wide social chasm between mistress and
maid. Between the American Revolution—by which time indentured
servitude was moribund—and the rise of mass immigration, the chasm
diminished in size, although the work of Faye Dudden would indi-
cate that there were marked class differences as early as the iSzos.4
In Jacksonian America domestics were frequently farm girls who
came to the city to find work. With the flood of desperately poor
people from Ireland and later from southern and eastern Europe, the
supply of domestics shifted to groups that had had very little prior
experience with American standards of domestic practice, unlike the
farm girls of an earlier period.
The changing nature of domestic service created problems in more
than one way. In the first place, middle-class Americans' expectations
96 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
about domestic comfort had risen when the supply of servants had
increased in the early nineteenth century.5 As we have seen, house-
wives began to devote more time to housework of a ceremonial nature
such as fancy needlework or holiday baking, secure in their ability
to turn over the more mundane tasks to servants. But when the sup-
ply of servants shifted from native-born to immigrant, housewives
began to confront domestics who had scarcely any idea of how to
approach their work. Backgrounds of poverty and deprivation had
provided little preparation for the performance of domestic duties
according to American standards. The volume of complaints about
servants swelled, with women typically blaming "green Erin" for all
their difficulties.
Moreover, the relationship between mistress and maid shifted
dramatically when ethnic and religious differences became so much
more marked. Lucy Salmon, an outstanding student of domestic
service at the turn of the century, was the first to identify this phe-
nomenon. Salmon pointed out that in the early nineteenth century
European travelers had always remarked on the absence of livery in
this country, livery representing a clear badge of inferior status for
servants in the Old World. Moreover, she quoted a New England
woman of the same period who asserted that the "help" had always
been married from the family parlor with her sisters for bridesmaids.8
"Help" routinely took meals with the family. Other evidence exists
to suggest that there could be an affectionate personal relationship
between mistress and maid in those years. For example, surviving
letters to Harriet Beecher Stowe from the family's nurse show that
the nurse called Stowe "My Dear Mama."7 Finally, the Barclays'
faithful domestic in Home is "help" and not a "servant." Sedgwick
calls her a "republican independent dependent."8
Clearly, no one was going to call "Bridget," as she was frequently
so personified, a republican independent dependent. She was Catho-
lic, poorly educated, and highly vulnerable. By no stretch of the
imagination could she be considered a member of the family. As
household size shrank because the average number of children de-
clined (from 7.04 per married white woman in 1800 to 3.56 in
1900), she was an increasingly intrusive presence. Beginning around
1850, back stairs began to show up in American houses so that there

could be more physical distance between servants and family.9 Fur-
thermore, and not surprisingly, a plethora of reformers directed their
attention toward solving the servant problem. Between the Civil War
and World War I, no other issue engaged so much attention in the
pages of the women's magazines.10
There were three main attempts at reform in the late nineteenth
century where domestic service was concerned. First, middle- and
upper-class women formed schools for the proper training of potential
domestics. For instance, one was founded in 1877 under the auspices
of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston. There
young women received practical instruction in cookery and related
matters. Schools for servants grew out of many of the same impulses
as did the domestic science movement, another late nineteenth-
century development, to be discussed in Chapter Six. In particular,
the impulse to train both mistress and maid frequently reflected in-
vidious assumptions about the Irish. Harriet Beecher Stowe thought,
for example, that the more the housewife herself might know about
domestic procedures, the less likely she would be "the slave of a
coarse, vulgar Irishwoman."11
Another possibility, explored more seriously in this period than at
any time before or since, was that of cooperative housekeeping. Mary
Peabody Mann explained the reasons for considering this approach
in an article in Hearth and Home in 1869. Asserting that "Bridget
has become demoralized," she went on to note that it was unlikely
that enough black women would move north to supply the region's
needs and saw only two possible solutions: cooperative housekeeping
or Chinese servants, who would probably become Americanized all
too soon.12 In 1869 a group of forty households in Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts, including most prominently that of Charles and Melusina
Fay Peirce, experimented with cooperative housekeeping, an experi-
ment that lasted about one year. A disappointed Melusina Peirce
subsequently explained to Frances Willard that most of the women
were unprepared to work hard enough to ensure the group's suc-
cess.13 Nonetheless, speakers at women's meetings such as the Con-
gress of the Association for the Advancement of Women, and authors
98 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
in periodicals such as The Revolution (the organ of the NWS A),

the Woman's Journal, and Godey's called for this approach.14
If cooperative housekeeping attracted attention but not many ad-
herents, a third approach to the servant problem, that of profession-
alizing housework, garnered much more attention because it seemed
more practical. No less a figure than Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote
an article advocating professionalized housework for The Revolution.
She envisioned a model village with a town laundry, a town bakery
(American housewives did not turn in large numbers to baker's bread
until after 1900), and a town cook shop where soups and meats
could be purchased.15 In another context, "Christopher Crowfield"
remarked, "Whoever sets neighborhood laundries on foot will do
much to solve the American housekeeper's hardest problem." Stowe
believed that if soap and candles could make the transition from
home to commercial production with no loss of quality, then so could
other components of the housewife's job.18
It is worth reminding ourselves of just how onerous that job could
be in the absence of a level of household help beyond the reach of
many Americans. An article in Hearth and Home describes a "sim-
plified" method for doing laundry that offers us a gauge of energy
expenditure that housewives needed to make on a regular basis. First,
the housewife was to soak the clothes in cold water for six hours after
rubbing the seams with soap. Then she was supposed to wash them
in tepid water and wring them out. Then bring them to a slow boil.
Then, fresh tepid water. Then wring them out and put them in a
cold rinse with a light bluing. The writer called this procedure "a
very moderate amount of hard labor."17 It was this sort of backbreak-
ing toil that made women interested in reform.
Another way of judging the nature of the housewife's job in the
late nineteenth century is to examine a list made up by Abby Diaz
in 1875. In discussing "A Domestic Problem," she tried to enumerate
the more frequently recurring tasks:
Setting tables; clearing them off; keeping lamps or gas-fixtures
in order; polishing stoves, knives, silverware, tinware, faucets,
knobs, &c.; washing and wiping dishes; taking care of food left
at meals; sweeping including the grand Friday sweep, the lim-
ited daily sweep, and the oft-recurring dust-pan sweep; clean-

ing paint; washing looking-glasses, windows, window-curtains;
canning and preserving fruit; making sauces and jellies, and
catchups and pickles; making and baking bread, cake, pies,
puddings; cooking meats and vegetables; keeping in nice order
beds, bedding, and bedchambers; arranging furniture, dusting,
and "picking up"; setting forth, at their due times and in due
order, the three meals; washing the clothes; ironing, including
doing up shirts and other "starched things"; taking care of the
baby, night and day; washing and dressing children, and regu-
lating their behavior, and making or getting made, their cloth-
ing, and seeing that the same is in good repair, in good taste,
spotless from dirt, and suited both to the weather and the occa-
sion; doing for herself what her own personal needs require;
arranging flowers; entertaining company; nursing the sick;
"letting down" and "letting out" to suit the growing ones;
patching, darning, knitting, crocheting, braiding, quilting,— but
let us remember the warning of the old saying ["If you count
the stars, you'll drop down dead"], and forebear in time.18
Her list is daunting. No wonder women were interested in Edward
Bellamy's ideas about the future.
Of course, Bellamy's Utopia fit right into discussions of profession-
alized housework. He went further than merely the discussion in the
novel, however, by writing an article with an agenda for change in
Good Housekeeping in 1889. Servants are on the way out, he pro-
claimed. They are anachronistic in a democratic society. What, then,
can be done to take their place? His analysis of the problem was bet-
ter than his proposed solution. In addition to calling for cooperation—
a reform that had been more discussed than implemented—and pre-
dicting technological breakthroughs, he advocated the consumption
of bakery bread and called for a "scientific cuisine." This evidently
relied on food prepared elsewhere than in the home kitchen.19
No writer went further in advocating professionalized housework
than Charlotte Perkins Gilman, one of the most important feminists
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. So thoroughgoing
was Oilman's rejection of the domestic ideal, however, that it repre-
sented a much more fundamental break with the past—ironically she
IOO JUST A HOUSEWIFE
was the niece of Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe—than

the ideas of those who merely wanted to save housewives from over-
work. For that reason, Oilman's ideas will be discussed in the context
of the feminist response to evolutionary theory, the subject of the
next chapter.
Indeed, there were so many reformers with so many ideas that
they added up to a "Grand Domestic Revolution," in the words of
Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly in 1871, as quoted by Dolores Hay-
den in her book of that title. Hayden argues that the "material femi-
nists"—that is, those who wanted to change the material foundations
of domesticity—understood in a way that was subsequently lost sight
of that it would be necessary to rethink the nature of the household
in order to free women to live richer lives. "For six decades the ma-
terial feminists expounded one powerful idea: that women must cre-
ate feminist homes with socialized housework and child care before
they could become truly equal members of society."20
Not surprisingly, many looked to technology for answers, and in
the late nineteenth century there were indications that technology
might indeed offer the housewife some relief. Although the home
cannot be considered to have been fully industrialized until the
19205, there were important developments in the latter years of the
nineteenth century that were indicative of the character that house-
work would assume in the twentieth century.
As we have learned, woodstoves had replaced open hearths in post-
Civil War cookery. This development did not necessarily lighten the
housewife's load a great deal—a store of fuel still had to be kept on
hand and the fire still had to be tended—but it did create the possi-
bility of carrying on a greater variety of cooking operations at the
same time. As the century wore on, stoves became increasingly elab-
orate. For example, in their American Woman's Home of 1869,
Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe furnished the draw-
ing of a stove that had a roaster on the side, so as to approximate
spit-roasting, and a reservoir for hot water, as well as burners and a
bake oven. By the 18905, stoves were being manufactured with tem-
perature gauges in the oven door.21 In short, the nineteenth century
witnessed revolutionary changes in the cooking process. Before 1830
TOWARD AN INDUSTRIALIZED HOME IOI
a housewife bent over an open hearth and tended a heavy iron pot;
in 1900 she stood at a stove, the temperature of which could be
"scientifically" regulated, and used a pan that was made out of an
alloy and hence was much lighter.22
Another invention that also lightened the load for women was the
sewing machine, a device that came into widespread use in the 186os.
As one reads the diaries and letters of an earlier period one is im-
pressed by the constant need for women to be sewing. Even on pio-
neering journeys, women spent time daily with their needles. In a
recent book on "westering" women, Sandra Myres reproduces diaries
of two such pioneers, one who took the overland trail and one who
went by sea, and both of whom left records of what they sewed while
en route.23 As a further example, Lydia Maria Child complained to
a friend about the heavy demands on her time occasioned by her
sewing:
Being so taken up with house-work all summer, my winter sew-

ing has crowded very hard upon me. No comfortables or quilts
for the beds, stout woolen trousers and frocks for Mr. Child
and the man, various quiddities to keep father warm. . . .
Ever since my girl came I have sewed diligently every hour not
employed in cooking, Sundays excepted.24
What must be remembered is that Child's sewing burden was this

great even in the absence of children. When growing children
needed to be provided with clothing, too, the burden increased sub-
stantially. Therefore, the sewing machine was welcomed by Godey's
as "the Queen of Inventions": "No wasting application, stooping over
the needle, without time for outdoor exercise, wearying for want of
change will be felt by women who have in their possession a good
sewing machine."25 As with stoves, sewing machines were being rap-
idly improved and refined in the late nineteenth century. A catalogue
from the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 listed the improve-
ments in design since the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876: there was
better tension, the stitch was firmer and more even, and the "lock"
(to prevent unraveling) was more secure.28
Yet another area of innovation in household technology lay in
102 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
refrigeration. Before the appearance of the "icebox," housewives had

preserved food by a variety of means. Meat might be smoked, cured
in brine, or salted down. The buttery was kept as cool as possible for
dairy products. The root cellar stored fruits and vegetables. And, of
course, in snowy climates the weather might produce the same effect
as the modern freezer. There is, for example, a wonderful descrip-
tion in a memoir of Harriet Beecher Stowe by Annie Fields of how
the Beecher family—children, help, and all—would throw themselves
into the work of preparing apples for cider. They would then have
a frozen barrel of cider in the milk room during winter from which
were cut "red glaciers, which when duly thawed, supplied the ta-
ble."27 By the 18505 ice vendors with carts were selling ice harvested
from frozen ponds to housewives in northern cities. This, in turn,
led to the development of chests or boxes in which the ice could be
placed. As in the instance of stoves and sewing machines, the cata-
logue of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 listed a number
of improvements that had recently been made in the technology of
refrigeration, such as improving the circulation of air inside the de-
vice.28 An advertising circular for the Whitson Refrigerator circa
1880 suggested that the housewife could garner favor with the maid
by buying the new product. "Shure an I'll lave the place if they
take it out," says an Irish maid. "After going in dat box eberyting
comes out right," according to a black maid.29
Thus even before electricity reached middle-class homes, there had
been the development of new appliances. After homes were rou-
tinely electrified—by the first decades of the twentieth century—the
possibilities for household technology expanded. The Electrical Build-
ing at the World's Columbian Exposition had suggested some of
these possibilities: electric stoves, electrified pans, washing machines,
and ironing machines, to name only a few.30 Fascination with tech-
nology was so widespread as to be shared by feminists: in 1891 the
Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association staged a fair at which
new products and gadgets were displayed, such as the "Little Won-
der Ice Cream Freezer."31
Another development with liberating potential for women was
the implementation of municipal water systems that eventually

brought running water into the average home. As with electricity,
indoor plumbing was not diffused throughout the society until the
early twentieth century. Therefore in the late nineteenth century,
most women had to haul inside all the water for laundry, dishwash-
ing, personal hygiene, and cooking, a truly onerous task. More un-
pleasant still was the necessity for disposing of slops, including the
contents of chamber pots.
As late as the turn of the century laundry remained a remarkably
burdensome task. A pamphlet written in 1906 presumes that the
reader will have a mechanical wringer, but nonetheless sets forth a
procedure that was an all-day undertaking (and more difficult still
if the housewife lacked access to running water).32 Despite the lapse
of nearly forty years between the article in Hearth and Home cited
earlier and this pamphlet, and despite a number of technological in-
novations, women still needed relief from this burden, hiring laun-
dresses, for example, if they could not afford full-time domestic ser-
vice.
Homes were changing, then, in many ways. The average size of
the household declined steadily throughout the nineteenth century.
For this reason, that is, because the family was becoming an increas-
ingly tight and private unit, and because of the type of servants avail-
able, there was widespread dismay over the "servant problem." This
dismay fueled a sense of urgency about the possibility of technologi-
cal breakthroughs for the home. Despite the introduction of a num-
ber of new appliances, however, in 1900 housework was still hard
work for both the housewife and her maid. Reformers sought a vari-
ety of means to lighten the load.
While these developments were taking place, there were other
changes occurring, too, that would have important long-term conse-
quences for the housewife. With the explosive economic growth of
the post-Civil War period, the food-processing industry was one of a
number of new industries to come into being and develop within the
space of a few years. A combination of improved rail transportation
and the growth of American cities created a national urban market,
and this, in turn, made national brands and national advertising

feasible.33 The technology to preserve food in hermetically sealed
cans had existed for decades, and in the 18705 and 18805 commercial
canneries began to appear, especially in California. As with so many
industries, ferocious competition led to a merger in the California
canning industry in 1899, a merger that ultimately resulted in the
creation of the giant multinational corporation Del Monte.34 Before
long, advertising copywriters would be telling housewives that food
in cans was inherently superior to what the housewives could pre-
pare on their own.
Even before the advent of canned foods, however, American cui-
sine was changing, and the consensus of culinary historians is that
it was changing for the worse. As we have learned, there had been
a proliferation of cookbooks in the second quarter of the nineteenth
century, cookbooks which suggested that middle-class Americans were
developing relatively sophisticated palates and had an appetite for
baked goods made with sumptuous ingredients. Under the tutelage
of authors like Eliza Leslie and Mary Randolph, housewives were
perfecting their culinary skills. In the words of John and Karen Hess:
"American cookery reached its highest level in the second quarter of
the nineteenth century with Miss Leslie as its guide. From then on,
it was downhill all the way."35 They adduce such factors as additives,
poorer quality flour owing to factory milling methods, and the in-
creasing use of sugar to explain the decline. By the late nineteenth
century the decline had become precipitous. Again quoting Karen
Hess:
By the end of the century with Fannie Farmer, there were no

more questions because she, and those who followed, had lost
touch with the fragrances, tastes, and textures of the past. Suc-
ceeding editions of her Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
(1896) saw ever-increasing amounts of sugar in bread and
salad dressings, and the inevitable substitution of sugary lemon
gelatine full of artificial flavoring and coloring for traditional
aspic mixtures; Jell-O was introduced in 1897 and swept the
country and Fannie Farmer, a remarkably imperceptive cook
possessed of a raging sweet tooth, was to become the patron

saint of the American kitchen.38
Hess contends that by the end of the century, most cookbook writers
had become "handmaidens of industry, wittingly or no."
It was in the area of baking that the most noticeable deterioration
took place. Chemical leavening came into increasing use, and cooks
could thereby substitute pearlash, soda, cream of tartar, and even-
tually baking powder for natural leavenings such as beaten eggs. As
early as 1869 this was lamented in Hearth and Home. The anony-
mous author of "Housekeeping Experiences" recalled that her mother
had been one of the best cooks in their town. The sponge cakes of
bygone days had been made only of flour, sugar, and eggs, the latter
beaten until the arm ached: "In the time referred to, cream of tartar,
in its relation to cookery, was a thing unheard of. The arrangement
of making things sour with one chemical in order to make them sweet
with another, had not yet entered into the practice or imagination of
our mothers." The sponge cakes of 1869 were "dry and choky," the
author complained.37 Certainly, chemical leavening permitted the
cook to economize on the other ingredients while requiring the cook
to possess less judgment and skill than one who used no such magic
shortcuts.
Thus when we examine the history of American cuisine, a strik-
ing pattern emerges, a pattern that may enable us to gain insight into
the impact of economic and technological change upon the home
more generally. We can discern two very distinct stages in the impact
of industrialization on cookery. The first stage produced more abun-
dance and more time for the housewife, without any noticeable de-
skilling of the cooking process. In fact, the cuisine of the average
household improved inasmuch as the housewife could devote more
time to it as well as having access to more ingredients than she had in
the eighteenth century. But as the century wore on—scholars identify
the Gilded Age as the watershed—industrialization began to have the
opposite effect, and a de-skilling process began, along with the con-
comitant deterioration of the cuisine. This process would accelerate
in the twentieth century. It is perhaps more than coincidence that

the high-water mark of the cuisine occurred at the same time as the
high-water mark of the cult of domesticity, although which was cause
and which was effect would be difficult to determine.
The overlap of the zenith of cookery with the Golden Age of Do-
mesticity in the antebellum years reminds us that it is important to
refer to the realm of culture when we try to assess the impact of eco-
nomic and technological change in the Gilded Age. We must first
take note of the fact that the domestic novel was dead, having played
itself out sometime in the i86os.38 No longer were women writers
rushing into print with their descriptions of housewifely prowess.
The energy was going rather into children's literature (it must be
acknowledged that some of the children's books were suffused with
domestic imagery) and historical romances. Only in the area of re-
gional or local-color literature were writers regularly presenting images
of domestic competence, and this genre never enjoyed the best-seller
status of the domestic novel.
A novella that also never enjoyed the status of best-seller but is
nonetheless important for our purposes because it belongs to the lit-
erary canon and embodies so negative a view of domesticity is Stephen
Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, published in 1893. More than
most, this is a work that exemplifies the way in which the society of
the Gilded Age seemed to some sensitive observers to be making do-
mesticity irrelevant. Indeed, in Maggie, set in a New York slum, it
is her chaotic, unloving home that drives the title character Maggie
Johnson to ruin.
The first member of the Johnson family to whom we are intro-
duced is young Jimmie, who is engaged in a fight with another street
urchin. The fight having ended, he goes home to a ragged, dirty sis-
ter and two drunken parents. Crane describes the filthy tenement,
using homely domestic details to underline the horror, indeed the
hellishness of the environment: the doorways are "gruesome," the
stove is "seething" rather than cheery, and the food is "grease-envel-
oped." Mrs. Johnson flies into a rage when she learns that Jimmie
has been fighting. Settling down, at least temporarily, she prepares
the evening meal:
"Git outa deh way," she persistently bawled, waving feet with
their disheveled shoes near the heads of her children. She
shrouded herself, puffing and snorting, in a cloud of steam at
the stove, and eventually extracted a frying-pan full of potatoes
that hissed.39
This is a grotesque caricature of the usual description of a mother
cooking for her family. Indeed, the Johnson's apartment is as much
an anti-home as the dwelling of Simon Legree. The difference be-
tween the approaches of Crane and Stowe lies in the fact that Stowe
made it obvious that Legree had created his house of horrors by
freezing out the softening influence of woman, except in the capacity
of mistress. In Maggie, the mother, with her fondness for breaking
furniture when in a rage, is the chief source of chaos. Her husband
explains his predilection for alcohol in this fashion: "My home reg'lar
livin' hell! Damndes' place! Reg'lar hell! Why do I come an' drin'
whisk' here this way? Cause home reg'lar livin' hell!"40 Crane makes
it plain that if the home is hell, Mrs. Johnson is the culprit—along
with the underlying social and economic forces that create a slum in
the first place. Moreover, in Maggie there is no home that is an oasis
of love and comfort—the role of the Quaker home in Uncle Tom's
Cabin.
As we have seen, Looking Backward, which did enjoy best-seller
status, dealt at length with home, but only from a technocratic view-
point. Nowhere in Bellamy's book is there any notion that traditional
skills might be valuable and hence worthy of being preserved. On
the one hand, he professes to value women highly and makes them
part of an "Industrial Army." On the other hand, women have a
highly distinct sphere, albeit not the home, and have what seems to
be second-class status.
Another best-seller of these years was the Reverend Charles Shel-
don's In His Steps, written in 1896. Because it sold millions of copies,
it is a valuable document for the historian who is trying to under-
stand the popular culture of the late nineteenth century, as well as
being valuable for insights into the evolution of American Protes-
tantism. Sheldon's book posed the question "What would Jesus do?"
and then set the standard for Christians of trying to follow as closely
Io8 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
as possible "in His steps." If Henry Ward Beecher's Norwood is one

of the central documents of Romantic Evangelicalism, then clearly
In His Steps is one of the central documents of the Social Gospel
that captured mainstream Protestantism at a time of widespread con-
cern about the impact of industrialization. This is because all of Shel-
don's characters wrestle with their responses to the social dislocations
caused by urbanization and industrialization.41 Saving their own souls
is not enough for them.
As the book opens, Henry Maxwell, prosperous minister of an
established church for the well-to-do, comes face-to-face with urban
poverty when an unemployed man staggers into the sanctuary on a
Sunday morning. Interrupting the sermon, the stranger challenges
the congregation to consider what they really mean when they sing
hymns about taking up the cross and following Jesus. The episode
is a catalyst for Maxwell, who accepts the challenge, pledging him-
self and asking for volunteers to join him in throwing aside a con-
ventional life and trying to live a committed Christian life. Those
who join him must make a variety of sacrifices with respect to family
life, business success, and career choice. When anyone wavers, he or
she is made to confront the terrible suffering of those in poverty and
despair and to realize how the past comfortable life had been built
on social injustice.
Significantly, home and domestic values are largely irrelevant to
Sheldon's purpose. The home provides no sanctuary for the urban
poor because economic fluctuations make it so vulnerable. Indeed,
the possession of a wife and children is seen as greatly increasing the
suffering of the man who cannot find work. At one point during a
discussion of the plight of such a man, a discussion taking place in
a settlement house, a Socialist makes an impassioned speech denounc-
ing the irresponsibility of most Christians. What he says about home
is telling: "I thank God, if there is a God, which I very much doubt,
that I, for one, have never dared to marry and try to have a home.
Home! Talk of hell! Is there any bigger one than this man with his
three children has on his hands right this minute?"42
If home offers no hope of redemption, neither does the love be-
tween a husband and wife, a love Beecher had presented as a major
TOWARD AN INDUSTRIALIZED HOME IOp
source of sanctification in Norwood. Several of the male characters

who take the pledge in In His Steps do so without sympathy from
their wives. Sheldon comments: "Truly 'a man's foes are of his own
household,' when the rule of Jesus is the great divider of life."43 Not
only is this a departure from Beecher, it is a departure, too, from the
thought of Horace Bushnell, with his emphasis on the saving role of
Christian nurture in the household.
The one way in which a vestige of the domestic ideal is presented
in In His Steps is in the character of Felicia Sterling, the "Angel
Cook" of the slums. Forced to support herself after the death of her
parents, the once-wealthy Felicia decides to devote her life to the
poor: "I have had a dream of opening an ideal cook shop in Chicago
or some large city and going around to the poor families in the slum
district . . . teaching the mothers how to prepare food properly."44
Armed with this ambition, she opens her shop and shortly thereafter
can claim, "I know already that the pure food is working a revolution
in many families." While these passages grant food an important
role, they show little respect for the capacities of the housewife. In
this, Sheldon reflected what was becoming conventional wisdom in
the late nineteenth century: the American housewife was seen as
needing help from outside experts in order to perform her work ade-
quately.
The vulnerability of the home to economic forces was a special
concern of other Social Gospel Christians. In 1886, Washington
Gladden, one of the leading spokesmen for socially concerned Chris-
tianity, listed a number of ways in which he saw the home being
weakened by industrialization. Most fundamental was the uprooting
of the young people who had to leave home to find employment and
often found themselves living in boarding-houses with little or no
supervision. Moreover, there was the instability of industrial life ow-
ing to strikes and business failures. Gladden feared that these condi-
tions militated against the possibility and the desirability of setting
up a home in the eyes of many young men.45
Twenty years later, another outstanding Protestant leader, Walter
Rauschenbusch, addressed many of the same difficulties. He argued
that the "industrial machine has absorbed the functions which women
/ IO JUST A HOUSEWIFE
formerly fulfilled in the home and has drawn them into its hopper."
This diminishes their chances of marriage, he contended, and creates
a worrisome social problem: "The health of society rests on the wel-
fare of the home. What, then, will be the outcome if the unmarried
multiply; if homes remain childless; if families are homeless; if girls
do not know housework; and if men come to distrust the purity of
women?"46
Both the mid-nineteenth century Protestants and the Social Gospel
Protestants agreed that the home was an institution of fundamental
importance to society. Where they differed was in extent of belief in
the independent power of the home. Using the language of modern
social science, we could say that Beecher, Bushnell, and Theodore
Parker saw the home as an independent variable, whereas Sheldon,
Gladden, and Rauschenbusch saw it as a dependent variable. For the
first group, the home acted upon society; for the second group, the
home was the passive object around which more potent social forces
swirled and upon which those forces acted.
The late nineteenth-century version of domesticity was, of course,
at variance with the militant vision of the home set forth by Cath-
arine Beecher in her Treatise on Domestic Economy of 1841. Beecher
had seen the home as a virtual battering ram for benevolent social
purposes. One wonders whether Beecher herself changed her mind
as she grew older, and the country entered so different a phase. Her
last book, American Woman's Home, which came out in 1869, was,
in fact, a revision of the 1841 volume that listed Harriet Beecher
Stowe as co-author. Much of the content was similar as far as the
specifics of advice were concerned. One difference in the books, how-
ever, lay in their introductions: in 1841 Beecher had begun with ex-
tensive quotations from Tocqueville and had then given her own
thoughts on the political ramifications of domesticity: in 1869 this sec-
tion had been dropped. It may be that Beecher thought her points
were too well known to require repetition. In any event, American
Woman's Home is much less political in tone than the earlier book.
That the domestic advice literature continued to depict the home
in elevated terms until well into the Gilded Age is suggested by
Julia M. Wright's The Complete Home, which appeared in 1879.
"For national and social disasters, for moral and financial evils, the
cure begins in the Household," Wright asserted in the preface. Each
household should be "gladsome in itself" but also a "spring of strength
and safety to the country at large." Her vision was a throwback to
the republican ideal because she insisted that each member of the
household, boys included, should contribute his or her labor to home
activities so as to spare not only the mother but also the servants. If
all labor willingly, then there will be time for beauty and social life,
she contended.47
The changes in the home and the domestic ideal in the Gilded
Age, then, can be summarized as follows. The ideal survived in ad-
vice literature and in the discussions of reformers. It no longer ani-
mated writers as it had a generation earlier and no longer afforded
much hope to Protestant spokesmen. Industrialization had already
led to a de-skilling of cookery, while new inventions proliferated that
would ultimately transform the nature of housework. Given the prob-
lematic aspects of domestic service and the onerous burden of work
that still existed in the average household, reformers sought means of
relief for the middle-class housewife.
Men and women of goodwill struggled with the problem; tech-
nology provided increasingly elaborate devices to save the housewife
from overwork; and yet the relief never really came. This seems mani-
fest when one examines the studies that suggest that time spent in
housework declined little if at all in the first two-thirds of the twen-
tieth century.48 An important reason that women's domestic respon-
sibilities stayed so heavy was the widespread diffusion of the private
automobile by the 19205. The very decade in which household tech-
nology created an industrialized home saw the housewife's job turn
into a post-industrial one; that is, the focus of her day began to shift
from production—of meals, of baked goods—to providing the service
of chauffeur. As Ruth Schwartz Cowan puts it, writing of the mid-
twentieth century, "The automobile had become, to the American
housewife of the middle classes, what the cast-iron stove in the
kitchen would have been to her counterpart of 1850—the vehicle
through which she did much of her most significant work, and the
work locale where she could most often be found."49
112. JUST A HOUSEWIFE
Yet unless we are willing to accept a technological determinism

and say that the automobile inevitably sealed the fate of the house-
wife, we must return to the late nineteenth century for an explana-
tion of her fate. When one examines the evidence regarding the
quantity of work that had to be done in the average home as late as
1900, it is clear that women still needed relief from overwork, espe-
cially if the home were to become genuinely democratic and non-
exploitative. Technology could have played a much more benign role
than it did. What went wrong?
It goes without saying that the interests of corporate America were
served by the commodifying of the home that would take place by
the 19205. This was a development that greatly enhanced the de-
skilling process without giving women any new skills instead. More-
over, new and less skilled tasks took the place of the old, about which
more will be said in subsequent chapters. But beyond blaming the
forces of advanced industrial capitalism, we can scrutinize the ideas
of those late-nineteenth-century reformers who tried to provide a di-
rection for their society. They can, in fact, be held responsible for a
number of errors in judgment, despite their good intentions.
In the first place, in common with most human beings in the late
nineteenth century (except perhaps, Henry Adams), they embraced
technology in an entirely uncritical fashion, making no attempt to
differentiate between household drudgery and work drawing on valu-
able skills. They were confident that machines could do any job well.
Yet if one examines the tasks of the housewife, one finds some, like
laundry, that are akin to the traditionally male job of ditch-digging,
and some, like cookery, that are more akin to cabinet-making. The
point is that, if anyone had tried seriously to analyze which house-
hold tasks belonged to a valuable craft tradition and which could be
eliminated from the home with no loss in skills, the housewife would
have benefited greatly.
Edward Bellamy was particularly blind to such nuances. The de-
partment store in his Utopia provides a good case in point. Dr. Leete's
beautiful daughter Edith conducts Julian West to the twentieth-
century emporium where people (mostly women) make all their pur-
chases. Julian looks around for a clerk to question about his proposed
purchase. Edith explains that there is no need for such interaction,

as all goods are clearly labeled and the clerk has no stake in a sale.
What Bellamy fails to understand is that he has envisioned a type of
clerical employment in which any possibility of personal satisfaction
in a job well done would be gone. Similarly, he fails to understand
that by removing most of the work from the home and giving women
a second-class status in the work force, he is not really improving
their position. Edith herself is little more than a consuming drone,
however beautiful.
Bellamy's estimate of the importance of home cooking was best re-
vealed in his Good Housekeeping article. In this, he argued that
there was less predisposition in favor of home cooking than had
existed twenty-five years earlier: "Mothers have long [since] ceased
to make pies." Further, mothers and aunts were unlikely to return to
the kitchen because they could not count on the appearance of their
menfolk at the dinner table: "The club and the restaurant now bid
successfully against the family table for the patronage of father, son
and husband, while the reproaches of the ladies too evidently derive
their edge from envy." The obvious solution to the problem in Bel-
lamy's eyes would be the removal of cooking from the province of
the home.
If reformers uncritically accepted "improvements," regardless of
which tasks were being displaced, this owed, too, to a lack of appre-
ciation for emotional intimacy and the ways in which the opportunity
for sharing emotion can be institutionalized at home. As we have
learned, Antoinette Brown Blackwell had written of her desire to
"give and take some home comfort," coining a memorable phrase.
There was precious little home comfort in Bellamy's Utopia, however.
In dispensing with the family dinner table, he eliminated the single
most likely means of providing for communion or any other emo-
tional interchange in a household.50
Yet another failure among reformers in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, especially among the "material feminists," to use Dolores Hay-
den's phrase, was their assumption that the problem of overwork for
the housewife could be solved without relying on men to do their
fair share of the housework. A few thought that women should co-
114 JUSTA HOUSEWIFE
operate among themselves to lighten the burden. Technology would

provide the answer in the minds of many. Others thought a new
source of household labor was the answer; still others thought remov-
ing most work from the home was the solution. The latter two ap-
proaches drew upon entrenched class and ethnic biases and assumed
that there would be a permanent class of menials whether inside or
outside the home. Yet in the words of Dolores Hayden:
Women can never gain their own liberation from stereotypes

of gender at the expense of other women of a lower economic
class or another race whom they exploit by paying them low
wages to do sex-stereotyped work. Black women and white
women, Yankee women and immigrant women, housewives and
servants, had to break out of woman's sphere together, or else
not at all. Any exceptional woman who escaped unpaid or low
paid domestic work could always be sent back to woman's
sphere again by men, unless the grand domestic revolution
touched all women and all domestic work.51
In the last analysis, all of the proposed solutions were retrograde in-
sofar as achieving full sexual symmetry, because they were steps
away from the vision articulated by Samuel May and Antoinette
Brown Blackwell.
Moreover, those reformers who failed to appreciate the importance
of a home's capacity to provide intimacy were unlikely to solve the
problem of mediating between public and private spheres. Many of
them—Bellamy, in particular, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as we
shall learn—wrote as if the public sphere should absorb all of so-
ciety's energy. They thus gave little or no attention to the issue of
how to create the virtuous home and how to link such a home to the
larger society, a problem that had engaged Emerson, for example.
Ironically, the long-term consequence of ignoring this issue was not
to liberate women, who were still ascribed to the home, but to trivial-
ize the home, thereby rendering it a much less satisfactory work en-
vironment.
Thus, material factors conduced to diminish the status of the home,
both in its capacity to play a transcendent role in the culture and in
its capacity to serve as an arena for the display of female prowess.

Yet industrialization was not the only means by which domesticity
was being devalued in the late nineteenth century. Contemporary
with the rapid economic changes of the Gilded Age was the crystalli-
zation of a new world-view—Darwinian evolution—that ascribed the
creative role in human development to male activity outside the
home. That "material feminists" and other reformers gave so little
thought to what could and should be preserved of the traditional
home doubtless owed much to the new world-view. To the impact of
evolutionary theory on the status of the home, we now turn.
FIVE
Darwinism and Domesticity:

The Impact of Evolutionary Theory
on the Status of the Home
Periodically in modern history scientists have set forth new

theories whose consequences go far beyond the internal de-
velopment of science as a system of knowledge and far beyond
such practical applications as they may happen to have. Dis-
coveries of this magnitude shatter old beliefs and philosophies;
they suggest (indeed often impose) the necessity of building
new ones. They raise the promise—to some men infinitely allur-
ing—of new and more complete systemizations of knowledge.
They command so much interest and acquire so much prestige
•within the literate community that almost everyone feels ob-
liged at the very least to bring his world outlook into harmony
with their findings, while some thinkers eagerly seize upon and
enlist them in the formulation and propagation of their own
views on subjects quite remote from science.
—Richard Hofstadter
W
^Kl/
ITH THIS STATEMENT, Richard Hofstadter opened his semi-
nal work about Darwinism in the United States, Social Darwinism
in American Thought, published more than forty years ago.1 Al-
though scholars in succeeding decades have explored many facets of
Charles Darwin's impact on American society, only in the last dozen
years have they turned their attention to Darwinism and women.2
The impact of Darwinism on the status of domesticity has received
116
DARWINISM AND DOMESTICITY I l"J
no attention at all. Yet the sweeping changes effected by a truly revo-

lutionary theory such as that attributed to Darwin should lead us to
expect that the theory must have had a profound impact on gender
constructs as well as on the status of the home. Briefly, the impact
can be summarized as follows. Darwinism tended to be reductionist
with respect to women, making reproductive capacity the chief crite-
rion of female excellence. Hence the whole complex of moral, social,
and religious values associated with Republican Motherhood was cast
in shadow. Moreover, Darwin and many of his followers explicitly
stated that women are biologically inferior to men. This, too, had a
negative impact on the status of the home. Perhaps most damaging
to the home was the fact that Darwin's theory of sexual selection lo-
cated the source of evolutionary change in male struggle for mates,
making men and male activity the "vanguard of evolution." Finally,
Darwinism helped promote the secularization of American society,
and thus served further to undermine the religious role of the home.
All of this eroded the interest of American intellectuals, including
women, in domesticity.
The orthodox Christian world-view was being undermined from
early in the nineteenth century onward. Even before Darwin pub-
lished On the Origin of Species in 1859, there were a number of in-
dividuals who were beginning to accept the idea that species are
changeable rather than fixed for eternity by God, which was the or-
thodox view. The most important pre-Darwin theorist of evolution
was the French scientist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), who
thought the engine of evolutionary change to be the heritability of
acquired characteristics. In other words, Lamarckianism allowed for
a dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment such
that the organism could pass on to its offspring what it "learned"
about adaptation to the environment. Inasmuch as the precise under-
standing of genetics has been a twentieth-century development, this
argument had a certain plausibility in the nineteenth century.
Another important predecessor to Darwin in creating a new world-
view was Sir Charles Lyell, the British geologist. Before the theory
of evolution could capture the allegiance of the majority, our very
understanding of time needed to be altered. In the early nineteenth
century, prevailing religious opinion set strict limits to the lifespan

of the earth. In the 18305—while Darwin was on his epochal voyage
on the Beagle—Lyell published his multi-volume Principles of Geol-
ogy, which convincingly argued that the earth was many hundreds
of millennia old, thus providing the time necessary for species to
evolve from one into another.
It is important to understand some of the groundwork for Darwin-
ism lest we fall into the error of attributing every aspect of the new
world-view to Darwin himself. Of course, Darwin must receive the
credit for working out in enormous detail the most widely accepted
theory of the mechanism by which evolution is thought to take
place—natural selection. While serving on a five-year voyage of dis-
covery sponsored by the British government, he was struck by the
close resemblance of species on isolated islands that shared a similar
environment—close resemblance but not identity. This led him to
speculate about evolution. By his own account, it was while reading
Malthus on population problems that he was further struck by the
fact that far more organisms are born than can survive. Common
sense suggests that only the fittest can survive to breed and create a
new generation. Given long periods of time and random changes in
organisms, a new species could evolve. Darwin's logic rested not on
genetics, unknown at the time, but rather on how breeders of do-
mestic animals can breed for desirable characteristics with a measure
of success.
Darwin in fact published the Origin some twenty years after this
insight came to him. He spent years of hard work laying the empiri-
cal groundwork for his edifice, paying close attention to selected
species. Clearly aware that his views would be controversial, he was
determined to protect himself against attack as best he could. In fact,
only the realization that another scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace,
was also on the track of natural selection galvanized him into pub-
lishing as soon as he did. He appears to have been both consumed
by anxiety about the anticipated attacks and equally determined to
tell the truth according to his best lights. So wearing was this tension
that he spent the better part of his adult life as a semi-invalid.
The Origin appeared, and so did the attacks. Nonetheless, impor-
DARWINISM AND DOMESTICITY IICJ
tant adherents on both sides of the Atlantic soon joined the cause.
Darwin continued to work diligently, and in 1871 The Descent of
Man appeared. In this book he made up for the omission of his own
species from the earlier work; specifically, he included humans in
the evolutionary process. Moreover, the Descent propounded the
theory of sexual selection as an addendum to—perhaps a modification
of—natural selection. Darwin was struck by the existence of secondary
sexual characteristics, such as the brilliant feathers on a male peacock,
that seem to have no obvious role in natural selection. He concluded
that some characteristics must have evolved in order to increase suc-
cess in mating, rather than success in obtaining food or in defense.
He further thought that there are two kinds of sexual selection, one
having to do with male struggle for mates and one having to do with
choice exercised by females.3 It was here that he dealt explicitly with
human females and revealed the extent to which he was the prisoner
of his own culture's sexual norms.
We know from a number of sources that Darwin was not espe-
cially enlightened about women. Perhaps most telling was his atti-
tude toward marriage. Returning to England from the voyage of the
Beagle, he resolved that he must quickly come to a decision about
whether or not to marry. His journal records some of his thoughts
about the pluses and minuses of matrimony:
Children—(if it please God)—constant companion, (friend in

old age) who will feel interested in one, object to be beloved
and played with—better than a dog anyhow—Home and some-
one to take care of house—charms of music and female chit-
chat. These things good for one's health. Forced to visit and
receive relations but terrible loss of time.4
A recent (and largely admiring) biographer, Peter Brent, says of this

passage, "It would be hard to conceive of a more self-indulgent, al-
most contemptuous, view of the subservience of women to men; in
this, as in so much else, Darwin was a true and conventional son of
his time and class."5 Having convinced himself that his interests
would best be served by marriage, he soon proposed to his cousin,
Emma Wedgwood, and was accepted. She bore him ten children, to
I2O JUST A HOUSEWIFE
whom he was an affectionate father. Brent concludes that, on bal-

ance, Darwin was a considerate husband, too. He was too much the
duty-bound Victorian to be otherwise. Moreover, he was sensitive to
the suffering of others, whether slaves, mistreated animals, or ex-
hausted wives.
What he lacked and possibly feared was depth of feeling. His
mother had died when he was a boy of eight, and Brent speculates
that this loss "rendered his deepest emotions inaccessible to him."
Over the years, he lost the capacity to enjoy art except in the most
superficial fashion—by having light novels read aloud by the women
of the family. This meant that he avoided contact with that area of
nineteenth-century English culture in which women were most likely
to excel. Indeed, his brother Erasmus was friendly with women of
accomplishment like Harriet Martineau and Jane Carlyle, but Charles
Darwin sequestered himself in his rural retreat and had no contact
with important literary intellectuals of either sex. He has been called
an "anaesthetic man" because of the crippled way he dealt with the
realms of art and profound emotion.6
This then, was the man who set forth his view of inherent female
capabilities in 1871. The tragedy is that one so limited in his contacts
and stunted in his emotional capacity was taken as guide on the sub-
ject by millions of educated people around the globe. Sexual selection
as presented by Darwin took the status quo of Victorian society—as
he experienced it—and read it into nature, proclaiming it to have
"the force of natural law."
In dealing with the differences between the sexes, Darwin used
the work of Sir Francis Gallon as a starting point. Gallon had con-
cluded that "men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women
in many subjects" and possess greater variability than do women.
Said Darwin, "The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the
Iwo sexes is shown by man's allaining lo a higher eminence, in what-
ever he takes up, lhan can woman—whether requiring deep thoughl,
reason, or imaginalion, or merely the use of the senses and hands."7
He suggested that lists of eminent men and women be drawn up and
a comparison made in order lo verify his and Gallon's contenlion.
DARWINISM AND DOMESTICITY 121
If "man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman,

and has a more inventive genius," how did his superiority arise:1 The
answer lies in the struggle among savages for women: "With social
animals, the young males have to pass through many a contest be-
fore they win a female, and the older males have to retain their fe
males by renewed battles." It takes more than brute strength to pre-
vail, said Darwin, and over time both sexual selection and natural
selection will favor the passing on of traits of courage and persever-
ance more fully to the male than to the female. "Thus man has ulti-
mately become superior to woman."8 (It should be remembered that
no one understood the mechanism of inheritance, and most assumed
that males passed on more of their traits to their sons, and females, to
their daughters.)
For Darwin, the only way to address the inequality of the sexes is
by biological means:
In order that woman should reach the same standard as man,

she ought, when nearly adult, to be trained to energy and per-
severance and to have her reason and imagination exercised to
the highest point, and then she would probably transmit these
qualities chiefly to her adult daughters. All women, however,
could not be thus raised, unless during many generations those
who excelled in the above robust virtues were married and pro-
duced offspring in larger numbers than other women.9
While civilized man does not struggle for a mate as did savage man,
he does struggle to maintain himself and his family, and this will
keep up or even increase man's mental powers and, "as a conse
quence, the present inequality of the sexes." It should be noted that
this analysis is rooted in a tacitly Lamarckian view of evolution
whereby training women will not only educate the current genera
tion, but also improve the stock.
What is most important is the fact that this formulation makes the
home utterly irrelevant to human progress. Male struggle outside the
home is the engine of change. Of necessity confined to the home and
to nurturing activities, women necessarily carry a biological taint.
Thus, disdain for the home, because of its inability to promote

change that could improve the species, and disdain for female abili-
ties reinforced one another.
Darwin was not the only influential evolutionary thinker of the
late nineteenth century. His compeer in propagating the new world-
view, especially in the United States, was the British writer Herbert
Spencer. Spencer was converted to evolution after reading Lyell and
before Darwin published his Origin. Of course, the appearance of
that magisterial tome furnished a would-be evolutionist with much
useful ammunition. For decades, Spencer worked out his interpreta-
tion of the social implications of evolution in a series of influential
books. Hofstadter says that by December 1903 the number of copies
of Spencer's books sold in America was 368,755—apparently a record
for books of such difficulty.
A great popularizer of science, Spencer was deeply influenced by
contemporary work in physics as well as in biology, especially by the
First Law of Thermodynamics, which posits the conservation of en-
ergy. Transferring both the "persistence of force," as he called it, and
evolution to the discussion of gender, Spencer developed his view of
women and their capacities. In The Study of Sociology he wrote,
"The first set of differences [between the sexes] is that which results
from a somewhat earlier arrest of individual evolution in women than
in men, necessitated by the reservation of vital power to meet the
cost of reproduction." The fact, then, that women mature earlier
than men—the point of Spencer's remarks—creates "a perceptible fall-
ing short in those two faculties, intellectual and emotional, which are
the latest products of human evolution—the power of abstract reason-
ing and that most abstract of the emotions, the sentiment of jus-
tice. . . ."10 Trying to change this given of nature by overeducating
a woman may serve to hamper her ability to reproduce because, since
energy is finite, that which goes to the brain in the process of educa-
tion will have been ineluctably drained from her demanding repro-
ductive system.
This explains the quantitative difference between the sexes in
mental capacity. As for the qualitative difference, it can be explained
by natural selection:
In the course of the struggles for existence among wild tribes,

those tribes survived in which the men were not only powerful
and courageous, but aggressive, unscrupulous, intensely ego-
istic. Necessarily, then, the men of the conquering races which
gave origin to the civilized races, were men in whom the brutal
characteristics were dominant; and necessarily the women of
such races, having to deal with brutal men, prospered in pro-
portion as they possessed, or acquired, fit adjustments of na-
ture. How were women, unable by strength to hold their own,
otherwise enabled to hold their own? Several mental traits
helped them to do this. We may set down, first, the ability to
please, and the concomitant love of approbation. . . . And
(recognizing the predominant descent of qualities on the same
side) this, acting on successive generations, tended to establish,
as a feminine trait, a special solicitude to be approved, and an
aptitude of manner to this end.11
It would be absurd to suggest that Darwin and Spencer created
the view of women as biologically inferior to men. All too many, even
friends of womankind such as Theodore Parker, were willing to con-
cede that women on the average have lesser intellectual capacity than
do men. Rather, what Darwinism did was to ratify pre-existing preju-
dices and give them greater validity by linking female inferiority to
a specific evolutionary argument about the virtue of male struggle.
In this regard, there were parallel developments in racial thought.
Racism certainly existed before the Origin. But after its publication,
"the potentialities of Darwinism as a rationale for American racist at-
titudes were soon apparent."12 Before long, evolution or the survival
of the fittest were being routinely invoked to justify a variety of racist
attitudes and policies.
What must be clearly understood is that evolution is fact, and nat-
ural selection is theory.13 Scientists still only imperfectly comprehend
how natural selection operates, let alone sexual selection. Nonethe-
less, the view of men as the vanguard of evolution penetrated widely
throughout American society in the late nineteenth century. Thus,
an arbitrary focus on male struggle as the engine of change was taken
as fundamental scientific truth. Says the Harvard biologist Ruth
Hubbard in her essay, "Have Only Men Evolved?":
It is likely that the evolution of speech has been one of the

most powerful forces directing our biological, cultural, and
social evolution, and it is surprising that its significance has
been largely ignored by biologists. But, of course, it does not fit
into the androcentric paradigm. No one has ever claimed that
women cannot talk; so if men are the vanguard of evolution,
humans must have evolved through the stereotypically male
behaviors of competition, tool use, and hunting.14
Clearly, the new world-view, which greatly enhanced the human

capacity to understand the natural world, also contained a core of
contempt for what were taken to be female nature, the female en-
vironment, i.e., the home, and the female contribution to human
progress, based not so much on "science" as on cultural assumptions.
What, then, of the reception of Darwinism in the United States?
That general question can be divided into two parts—the reception
among scientists and the reception in the larger society—both of which
we must address because in this instance biological theory and social
and cultural change had a high degree of interaction. As for scien-
tists, Darwin obtained a remarkably smooth victory in this country.
His great antagonist, Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born naturalist, found
that even his own students were defecting shortly before his death
in i873.15 But though evolution enjoyed such an easy conquest, this
was not tantamount to a complete victory for Darwinian orthodoxy. A
number of American scientists began to subscribe to a view they
identified as "neo-Lamarckian," in which they downplayed the im-
portance of natural selection and emphasized the significance of
change through the heritability of acquired characteristics. In the
18905 there were probably more neo-Lamarckians than Darwinians
in American science.18 Only the work of August Weismann in that
decade and the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work on genes around
1900 permanently discredited Lamarckianism.
Well before the arrival of Darwinism on these shores, science had
begun to enjoy remarkable esteem in American culture. It has been
suggested that, with the erosion of traditional Christian belief, science
offered Americans a new orthodoxy, a new source of authority, and
even a new set of values. In a penetrating analysis of the impact of
science on American social thought, Charles Rosenberg argues that

the nineteenth century saw "a constantly shifting equilibrium be-
tween secular and religious imperatives. The similarity between scien-
tific and religious values made it natural for most Americans to move
fluidly from one intellectual and emotional realm to another."17
Nonetheless, Darwinism offered a considerable challenge to tradi-
tional Christian belief, a challenge that required hard thought and
difficult decisions for those Christians who wanted to be up-to-date
in their opinions. If Lyell and Darwin were right, what happened
to the literal truth of the Bible and its depiction of creation? Darwin
offered a rigorously materialistic view of the universe—so much so
that he wrote a book, Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, in
which he treated the emotions in the light of their evolutionary role.
What, then, happened to the role of the human spirit? These were
troubling questions, but most liberal Christians were able to resolve
them, at least for a time, in such a way as to cling simultaneously to
Darwinism and to their religion.18
By the 18905, belief in evolution if not in the entire Darwinian ap-
proach had captured the citadel of American thought. Yet so protean
were its uses that one has to be very careful in dealing with the topic.
For example, for most people, evolution conduced toward a view of
the universe as highly deterministic and mechanistic. In the case of
the philosopher Charles Peirce, on the other hand, an adherence to
Darwinism convinced him of the role of chance in life. He therefore
coined the term "tychism," after the Greek word for chance, to de-
scribe his own view of the importance of randomness.19 One gener-
alization that seems secure, however, is that Darwinism focused
attention on biology rather than on culture.
Not surprisingly, it did not take long before the heightened atten-
tion to biology showed up in work dealing with women. A particu-
larly clear example of biological reductionism was the statement by
a physician in 1870: "It was as if the Almighty in creating the female
sex, had taken the uterus and built up a woman around it."20 The
most notorious example of such thinking—and one that evoked a
strong response from contemporary feminists—was Dr. Edward
Clarke's Sex in Education; or a Fair Chance for the Girls, published
in 1873. In some ways, Dr. Clarke was willing to place a higher

value on women than had either Spencer or Darwin. Indeed, he
began his book—which had originated as an address to the New En-
gland Women's Club—with a strong denial that one sex is superior
to the other. Nonetheless, he proffered the argument, reminiscent of
Spencer, that girls must receive an altogether different education than
boys, lest their reproductive systems be damaged: "There have been
instances, and I have seen such, of females in whom the special
mechanism we are speaking of [the reproductive system] remained
germinal,—undeveloped. It seemed to have aborted. They graduated
from school or college excellent scholars, but with undeveloped
ovaries. Later they married, and were sterile."21 According to Clarke,
because American girls were in general better educated than their
European counterparts, their health had suffered accordingly. All too
often, American girls were required to study even while menstruat-
ing, and this did them irreparable harm. Hence, coeducation was ill-
advised. What made the book so damaging to women was the fact
that it set up the reproductive capacity as central in evaluating a
woman's life and worth. An educated woman who opted for a small
family was not exercising rational choice but instead demonstrating
her biological impairment. Interestingly, Clarke argued that factory
girls were not at the same risk as school girls because physical labor
does not tax the nervous system in the same way that brain work does.
Particularly infuriating to feminists was Dr. Clarke's use of the
term "agene" (Greek, meaning "without sex") to characterize those
women who had "arrested development of the reproductive system."
Women suspected that he was really maligning single women as a
group when he spoke of "Amazonian coarseness and force" in his
subjects and called them "analogous to the sexless class of termites."
So threatening was Dr. Clarke's book to the cause of higher educa-
tion for women, to say nothing of coeducation, that it provoked a
series of articles in the leading feminist publication of the day,
Woman's Journal, that were subsequently collected into a book. The
authors wanted to refute Dr. Clarke, yet were limited in their ability
to do so by their clinging to the same view of woman's special nature
that he postulated—although they placed a higher value on it. Julia
DARWINISM AND DOMESTICITY I2/
Ward Howe edited the volume, and her essay is a particularly strik-
ing example of this dilemma. She fully agreed with the view that
menstruation places extraordinary demands on the female system:
"I have known of repeated instances of incurable disease and even
of death arising from rides on horseback taken at the critical pe-
riod."22 Where she took issue with Dr. Clarke was in his indictment
of education as the sole cause of the problem. Indeed, the respondents
in the volume all took the doctor with the utmost seriousness and
shared many of the same premises.
A more systematic and hence more effective response came from
Antoinette Brown Blackwell in her remarkable book, The Sexes
Throughout Nature, published in 1875. In this work, she took on
not only Dr. Clarke but Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as
well. While Blackwell, too, accepted the premise that there are sig-
nificant differences between the sexes, she rejected out of hand the
idea that women need to be treated as semi-invalids during a portion
of their lives. Rather, hard and meaningful work will promote good
health: "It is one of my firmest convictions that if overwork has slain
its thousands of women, underwork has slain its tens of thousands,
who have perished more miserably." Given the fact that she had no
training as a scientist, she tried to take on the male scientific estab-
lishment with logic, a formidable tool in her hands.
It has taken the better part of the twentieth century for the under-
standing to coalesce that science is a human activity, subject to the
prejudices of its practitioners as are all human activities, and not a
purely objective reading of the book of the universe. Nonetheless,
Blackwell began her book by making this very point:
Any positive thinker is compelled to see everything in the light

of his own convictions. The more active and dominant one's
opinions, the more liable they must be to modify his rendering
of related facts—roping them inadvertently into the undue ser-
vice of his theories. . . . When, therefore, Mr. Spencer ar-
gues that women are inferior to men because their development
must be earlier arrested by reproductive functions, and Mr.
Darwin claims that males have evolved muscle and brains
much superior to females, and entailed their pre-eminent qual-
ities chiefly on their male descendants, these conclusions need

not be accepted without question, even by their own school of
evolutionists.23
Having begun with the insight that those who accept the truth of
evolution need not accept as gospel everything that Spencer and
Darwin said about gender, Blackwell goes on to make a series of
telling points. For example, if Darwin and Spencer were correct
about the differential evolution of the two sexes, how much longer
will men and women belong to the same species? "These philosophers
both believe that inheritance is limited in a large degree to the same
sex and both believe in mathematical progression. Where, then, is
male superiority to end?" Given the long time span required for
evolution to take place, even small differences could become gross
differences over the millennia, if Darwin and Spencer were right.
Again congruent with her original insight, she argues that Darwin
fixed his attention only on masculine characteristics and could thus
conclude that there is a decided imbalance in the capacities of the
two sexes in favor of the male. If one takes seriously the contribution
of the female to the species, whatever the species may be, a balance
will be restored:
It requires a great amount of male surplus activity to be ex-

pended physically in motion and psychically in emotion, as well
as a good deal of extra ornamentation and brilliancy of color-
ing, to balance the extra direct and indirect nurture, the love,
and the ingenuity which the mother birds, and even the in-
sects, bestow upon their young.24
In other words, nurture, like struggle, is an activity that must be

taken seriously in the evolutionary process. In making this point,
Blackwell was, in effect, offering a brief for the significance of the
home.
The key to Blackwell's argument is the contention that the two
sexes must of necessity be roughly equal in overall contributions to
the survival of a species because small differences, over time, could
add up to something other than small differences. She even made a
DARWINISM AND DOMESTICITY I2p
diagram to show how the contributions of men and women are in a

state of equilibrium. So eager was she to have her approach validated
that she called for scientific research in the area: "By all means, let
the sexes be studied mathematically."
What she both believed in so strongly and hoped for so fervently—
the equality of the two sexes—led her into those speculations about
the division of household labor with which we are already acquainted.
Only if woman has every opportunity to excel will the world know
what she is capable of, and that opportunity will not come if she
carries the complete responsibility for housework:
Whatever her hand finds to do let her do it with her might,
in demonstration of her capacity.
Morally certain it is that she will neither forego, nor desire
to forego, her domestic relations; nor will the average woman
seek to evade an equitable share of the burdens and disabilities
of her station, or shrink from sharing honorably all the many
duties which arise within the home-life. Evolution has given
and is still giving to woman an increasing complexity of de-
velopment which cannot find a legitimate field for the exer-
cise of all its powers within the household. There is a broader,
not a higher, life outside, which she is impelled to enter, tak-
ing some share also in its responsibilities.
This need in no wise interfere with the everyday comforts,
the fostering mental influences, and the moral sanctities of
the home. . . .2S
It was a brave attempt, but she was overmatched, not in intellec-

tual ability, but in credentials and hence in access to an audience.
Because she lacked an aura of authority and had no mass social
movement to take up her claims—indeed, it served the purposes of
domestic feminism to emphasize male-female differences—knowledge
of her writing died out. Only in the last fifteen years or so has it
been rediscovered.26
It is useful to examine current responses to biological reductionism
by way of contrast. In 1975 a new intellectual formulation, socio-
biology, emerged, a formulation that once again emphasizes biology
at the expense of culture. While it has captured its adherents and
13° JUST A HOUSEWIFE
garnered predictable media attention, it has also encountered power-

ful opposition from feminist scientists, male and female. Many scien-
tists who oppose sociobiology possess the very credentials of scientific
training and tenure in a prestigious university that Blackwell lacked.
Further, important scientific developments of the twentieth century
make possible a more effective response to biological reductionism
than could be made in the nineteenth century. A brief discussion of
some of the ideas put forward by contemporary scientific opponents
of sociobiology will underline the difficulties feminists faced one hun-
dred years ago in trying to defend female nature against the evolu-
tionary onslaught.
Neurophysiologist Ruth Bleier contends that the methodology of
sociobiology "consists essentially of flipping through the encyclopedic
catalogue of animal behaviors and selecting particular behaviors of
fishes, birds, insects or mammals that can be readily made to exem-
plify the various categories of human 'traits' and social arrangements
that Sociobiologists claim to be universal and genetically based." She
then summarizes the modus operandi of sociobiologists as follows:
Sociobiologists attempt to reconstruct evolutionary history by

inventing plausible stories that attempt to show how a particu-
lar behavior or social interaction in humans or other species
could have or would have been adaptive and therefore favored
by natural selection and genetically carried through subsequent
generations.27
Since the nature of genetic encoding was not established until the
19505, this line of argument—one that suggests that sociobiologists are
guilty of a certain circularity of argument wedded to an imperfect un-
derstanding of genetics—was unavailable to those who might desire to
oppose biological reductionism one hundred years ago. Another line
of argument that was not available has to do with the current under-
standing of the stability of the human species. Modern science has
demonstrated that "Homo sapiens arose at least 50,000 years ago, and
we have not a shred of evidence for any genetic improvement since
then."28 Of course, Darwin and Spencer assumed otherwise and
rested much of the argument for male superiority on the supposition
that male struggle continues to promote male evolution at a dispro-

portionate rate compared to that of the female.
Finally, Ruth Hubbard offers an astute observation about the
similarity in context in which both sexual selection and sociobiology
arose: "The recent resurrection of the theory of sexual selection and
the ascription of asymmetry to the 'parental investments' of males
and females are probably not unrelated to the rebirth of the women's
movement. We should remember that Darwin's theory of sexual se-
lection was put forward in the midst of the first wave of feminism."29
In this instance, history has given a twentieth-century scientist an
insight impossible to achieve in the Gilded Age.
Given the intellectual tools that were unavailable, how did the
friends of womankind deal with evolutionary theory in the late
nineteenth century? The two most important defenders of woman
after Blackwell were Lester Frank Ward and Charlotte Perkins Gil-
man. In defending female humanity against the charges of biological
inferiority, Ward and Gilman used the home as an explanation for
woman's alleged underdevelopment. This they could do because they
both steadfastly adhered to Lamarckianism and saw the home as an
environment that stunted the development of those who spent time
in it. Hence, in addition to the devaluation of domesticity suggested
by evolutionary theory itself, there was a further attack on the home
by two of woman's champions.
Lester Frank Ward was one of the truly remarkable individuals of
the late nineteenth century. Born in 1841, one of ten children, he
worked as an agricultural laborer and fought in the Civil War before
obtaining a college degree at night school. His professional experience
eventually included legal training, botanical publications, work with
the U.S. Geological Survey, and the publication of outstanding works
in the field of sociology. One of the founders of the latter discipline,
he became a professor of sociology at Brown University in 1906 and
was elected to be the first president of the American Sociology So-
ciety that same year.
Ward's Dynamic Sociology was the first important treatise in the
field to be published in the United States. For Hofstadter, Ward was
the American who, while adhering to the truth of evolution, tried
132- JUST A HOUSEWIFE
hardest to reclaim it from those such as Spencer and William Gra-

ham Sumner, the latter of whom used Darwinism to justify laissez-
faire. Thus Ward was a pioneering advocate of positive state action
to achieve benevolent social purposes. This stance rested on the dis-
tinction he made between blind, natural forces and social phenomena
that can be governed by human intervention. In effect, he was trying
to reestablish teleology, since belief in a purposive universe had
fallen victim to Darwinism. In the words of Hofstadter, "If there is
no cosmic purpose, there is at least human purpose, which has al-
ready given man a special place in nature and may yet, if he wills it,
give organization and direction to his social life. Purposeful activity
must henceforth be recognized as a proper function not only of the
individual but of a whole society."30
A genuine democrat with much faith in the power of education
to ameliorate social ills, Ward recoiled in dismay from established
inequalities, including those between the sexes. Accepting natural
selection—with an admixture of Lamarckianism—and praising Charles
Darwin for his pioneering role, Ward nonetheless adhered to premises
quite unlike those of Darwin in his own discussion of male-female
differences. Ward began with the understanding that, for the pur-
poses of nature, "the fertile sex is of by far the greater importance
and this increased importance is abundantly shown throughout all
the lower forms of life where these purposes are predominant." If
nature favors the female sex in myriad ways among plant and animal
species, what, then, created the obverse condition among humans?
Ward speculated that since, according to contemporary belief, males
have stronger sexual appetites than do females, males wrested the
power to choose a mate away from the sex to whom this power be-
longs throughout most of the natural world. Male passion conquered
female virtue—in the old-fashioned sense of the word "virtue" mean-
ing prowess. Women then became property and were often chosen
for their beauty rather than for intellectual qualities. "And the in-
ferior position of woman, maintained through so many ages, has ac-
tually resulted in rendering her both physically and mentally inferior
to man."31
Ward thus agreed with Darwin and Spencer that modern women
are inferior to men. Where he differed was in his estimate of the rela-
tive position of the sexes in the rest of the natural world, in his un-
derstanding of how women became inferior, and in his prognosis for
humanity. Indeed, the prognosis to be inferred from Darwin and
Spencer had been grim. Darwin had offered the slight hope that both
the education of women and the greater fecundity of those who were
well educated might help women catch up with men over a number
of generations. But Spencer dashed that hope with his theory, which
generated a great deal of attention, that educating women would
make them less fertile. Ward had an easier solution—get women out
of the kitchen:
It is often remarked that women are, as a rule, more frivolous
and trifling than men. Being the truth, it may as well be
spoken, and the explanation will prove a sufficient vindication of
the sex; for it will be found that their ideas are exactly as much
less important than those of men as their experiences are less
useful. Where the only objects with which woman comes in
contact are those of the kitchen, the nursery, the drawing-
room, and the wardrobe, how shall she be expected to have
broad ideas of life, the world, and the universe? Her ideas are
perfecdy natural and legitimate. She has seen and handled
culinary utensils, china, and silver-ware, and she has idea of
them. In the absence of other ideas, she will think about them,
talk about them, have her whole mind absorbed with them.
The mind must act, and this is all the material it has to act
upon. It is the same of dress; her soul is engrossed in dress,
since it is her most important object of experience. If you wish
to make her forsake it, you must give her something else to
think of. Give woman an interest in great subjects, and she
will soon abandon small ones. If she knew as much about the
great men of history or of her own age as she does about her
neighbors, she would cease to talk about the latter and talk
about the former. Teach her science, philosophy, law, politics,
and you will do much to put an end to gossip, slander, and
fashion-worship.82
While Ward's desire to give women a broader sphere of activity

and an improved education was positive for women, less positive
1$4 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
was his summary dismissal of women's culture and his apparent

blindness to the female energy that had gone into a number of re-
forms throughout the nineteenth century. Only one who accepts as
true by definition the idea that female small-talk is trivial while male
small-talk is not, could have written this paragraph. Furthermore, one
as committed to humane reform as Ward was might have been ex-
pected to have noticed the existence of the "benevolent empire" of
female charitable activity. Finally, unlike Blackwell, Ward offered
no suggestion as to how domestic tasks might be performed so as to
free women. So unimportant did they seem to him as to be unworthy
of attention. Ward's attitude should be contrasted with that of
Theodore Parker, who, in an earlier period, argued that home duties
enlarge the social sympathies.33
Over the centuries, woman's confinement to the home has had a
physical impact on her brain, Ward thought. "Brain can only de-
velop by use. It must languish from disuse. The causal faculty of
woman has had no exercise, therefore it has not developed."34 In the
antebellum years, when domesticity had enjoyed its greatest esteem,
the givers of domestic advice had been emphasizing the contrary—
that running a household and kitchen as well as setting the moral
tone of the home required both intelligence and character. How
much the emergent attitude owed to evolutionary theory per se and
how much to the economic forces unleashed in the late nineteenth
century is difficult to judge with certainty. What is certain is that the
new attitude boded ill for those who, by reason of gender, class, or
race, might still be consigned to perform the housework.
An even more forceful attack on the home was launched by Char-
lotte Perkins Gilman in a number of important books written in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A student of Ward's
work and an evolutionist, Gilman was a brilliant systematizer who
tried to go beyond political rights for woman to such matters as
woman's economic dependence and her sexual role. A dedicated
iconoclast, she argued that confinement to the home is the chief
reason for woman's inferiority.
So thoroughgoing was Oilman's rejection of her culture's prescrip-
tions for women that she lived her iconoclasm as well as writing
about it. As a child, Charlotte Perkins had had little reason to see her
home in any very favorable light. Writing her autobiography near
the end of her life, she recalled a chaotic and unloving household
owing to her father's irresponsibility and her mother's coldness. Gil-
man's mother, a woman whose best hopes had been blighted by her
unhappy marriage and subsequent divorce, and the life of genteel
poverty to which the family was then condemned, withheld affection
from her daughter so as to toughen her for the vicissitudes of life.
The mother was "passionately domestic" but had not been able to
enjoy even that activity because of the family's circumscribed exis-
tence. A brother fourteen months older than she was the source of
teasing rather than companionship for Oilman. For all these reasons,
as an old woman, she could still recall vividly her first encounter with
a loving home. Visiting some cousins, she said, "I saw how lovely
family life could be. Instead of teasing and ridicule here was courtesy
and kindness."35 Another vivid childhood memory was the visit to
her great aunt, Harriet Beecher Stowe. (Gilman's paternal grand-
mother was Mary Beecher Perkins.)
Not surprisingly, when she became an adult, she had profoundly
mixed feelings about marriage. She had striven for years to achieve
control over her emotions and distrusted the powerful feelings, sex-
ual attraction among them, that were evoked in her by Charles Stet-
son, a young painter who wanted to marry her. She took months be-
fore reaching an affirmative decision and suffered "periods of bitter
revulsion, of desperate efforts to regain the dispassionate poise, the
balanced judgment I was used to."
As a young married woman and then a mother, Gilman suffered
an emotional decline and eventually a breakdown. Her mother came
to help, her husband undertook to perform more than the usual allot-
ment of husbandly duties, but nothing relieved her despair: "Here
was a charming home; a loving and devoted husband; an exquisite
baby, healthy, intelligent and good; a highly competent mother to
run things; a wholly satisfactory servant—and I lay all day on the
lounge and cried."38 Domesticity was literally driving her to mad-
ness, or so it seemed to her at the time. Consultation with a leading
physician, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who specialized in nervous dis-
orders and had obviously taken Herbert Spencer's ideas to heart, only
made things worse. Gilman recalled his advice as follows: " 'Live as
domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time.'
(Be it remarked that if I did but dress the baby it left me shaking
and crying—certainly far from a healthy companionship for her, to
say nothing of the effect on me.) 'Lie down an hour after each meal.
Have but two hours' intellectual life a day. And never touch pen,
brush or pencil as long as you live.' "37
In her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," Gilman uses homely
domestic details to evoke the horror of her own breakdown. Written
in the first person, the story describes a young housewife's descent
into madness. Deprived of meaningful work by her husband's sinister
overprotectiveness, she lies in her room and follows the pattern of
the wallpaper, becoming increasingly obsessed by it. Eventually she
loses the ability to distinguish between real life and her fantasies
about the wallpaper.38
Happily for her emotional well-being, Gilman rejected Dr. Mitch-
ell's advice and asserted her autonomy by leaving her husband. She
then transgressed a sacrosanct cultural norm by allowing him and his
second wife to do a major share of the rearing of young Katharine
Stetson—for which she received a great deal of criticism. Having
established a national and eventually an international reputation as
a writer and lecturer and thus an identity distinct from domesticity,
Gilman was able to remarry, happily, at the age of thirty-nine. Yet
she never fully recovered from the breakdown, being subject to pe-
riodic depressions for the rest of her life. Despite this self-confessed
emotional flatness, however, her boldness and her prolific writings
gave her a high status among her contemporaries. The Nation praised
Women and Economics (1898) as "the most significant utterance"
about women since John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women,
and the suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt placed Gilman at the
top of her personal list of outstanding American women.39
The extent to which Gilman departed from earlier discussions of
domesticity by feminists can best be gauged if we survey, in brief,
the history of feminist thought with respect to the home. In her
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the founding mother
of Anglo-American feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, had insisted that

women needed a broader education than they then received in order
to perform their domestic duties adequately. Too often, she charged,
a woman was expected to take the role of frivolous plaything, a role
for which ignorance was seen as a desirable attribute. This then mili-
tated against the optimal performance of domestic duties because,
trained from birth as a being who could be "the weathercock of its
own sensations," she could never develop the requisite "austerity of
behavior" in later life. Wollstonecraft concluded, "It is plain from
the history of all nations, that women cannot be confined to merely
domestic pursuits, for they will not fulfil family duties unless their
minds take a wider range."40 This bears a certain resemblance to
Blackwell's contention that both woman and the home would benefit
if she were to move from "bound to rebound" between public and
private spheres. In any event, Wollstonecraft certainly dignified the
importance of the home.
The great generation of antebellum feminist-abolitionists dignified
the importance of the home, too—although some of them uttered
heartfelt complaints about their own heavy domestic burdens. What
is most striking is the fact that many of the women who married
found like-minded men who were willing to rearrange their own
lives for reform purposes, and thus these women had far less reason
to be angry about domestic responsibilities than did the average
middle-class woman of the day. In her study of feminist-abolitionists,
Blanche Glassman Hersh contends that her subjects thought it was
important to be good at both roles—reformer and housewife. For ex-
ample, Elizabeth Smith Miller wrote for the Revolution as well as
publishing a book with recipes and advice on entertaining.41 Hersh
quotes Lucy Stone as follows: "I think that any woman who stands
on the throne of her own house, dispensing there the virtues of love,
charity, and peace . . . occupies a higher position than any crowned
head. . . . However, woman could do more."42 After her death, her
widower Henry Blackwell wrote a tribute to the suffrage women in
the Woman's Journal: "Never have I known more affectionate wives,
more tender mothers, more accomplished housekeepers, more satis-
fied husbands and children, more refined and happy homes."*3 In
short, the suffrage movement exhibited pride in all the accomplish-

ments, including the domestic, of its leaders.
A woman who had more to complain of than many of her sister
suffragists was Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Henry Stanton tended to be
thoughtless and unhelpful. As Elizabeth struggled under the domestic
load occasioned by her large family, she turned to her close friend
Susan B. Anthony for relief, rather than to her husband. At one
point she wrote to Anthony, "I pace up and down these two cham-
bers of mine like a caged lion, longing to bring to a close childrearing
and housekeeping cares. I have other work at hand." And again, "Oh,
how I long for a few hours of leisure each day. How rebellious it
makes me feel when I see Henry going about where and how he
pleases. He can walk at will through the whole wide world or shut
himself up alone, if he pleases, within four walls. As I contrast his
freedom with my bondage, and feel that because of the false position
of women, I have been compelled to hold all my noblest aspirations
in abeyance in order to be a wife, a mother, a nurse, a cook, a house-
hold drudge, I am fired anew and long to pour forth from my own
experience the whole long story of woman's wrongs."*4
Despite her resentment, however, Stanton also prided herself on
her skills as a housewife. At one point, writing in the Revolution, she
engaged in a war of words with "Mrs. Kate Hunnibee," who wrote
a pseudonymous column in Hearth and Home. Stanton suggested
that there seemed to be considerable sickness in the "Hunnibee"
household and attributed this to "Mrs. Hunnibee's" being too little
engaged outside the home. Asserting her own domestic credentials,
Stanton pointed out "Why, Kate, it is only ten years since that we
dandled our last. . . ."45 A year later an anonymous article in the
Revolution entitled "Homes of the Strong-Minded," gave a glowing
description of the Stanton household. "Mrs, Stanton is a scientific
cook. . . . Better bread, and more savory goodies, one could find
nowhere, strange as it may seem."46
One of the most interesting commentaries on the value of the
home in feminist eyes came from Susan B. Anthony, a woman who
never married and who spent much of her life traveling to promote
the suffrage cause. Nonetheless, she understood that most women
would not like to be placed in the position of having to choose be-

tween access to opportunity or the possession of a home. Rejecting
invidious stereotypes of the old maid, Anthony also rejected the idea
that an unmarried woman must perforce live with married relatives.
Realistically, she acknowledged that there might be a period of
transition during which more women than men would have outgrown
"the Blackstone coverture" view of marriage whereby a married
woman gave up her autonomous legal identity. Therefore, she
thought it important that women be informed of the various "Homes
of Single Women" that she herself had visited so that they might
have a positive image of the single state, and be less tempted to marry
someone unsuitable out of desperation. She described homes in Mas-
sachusetts and in Colorado—homes that were cozy, comfortable, and
hospitable.47
At the age of seventy-one Anthony took her own advice, moved
to Rochester, and set up housekeeping. A letter to her brother re-
veals her amused delight about the new venture: "Now can't you
and May come down and visit us—visit sister Susan in her first at-
tempt at a house all by herself alone!! . . . I feel that I am going to
take lots of comfort being in my own house and entertaining my
friends at my very own table—Of course sister Mary laughs and doesn't
believe I shall succeed—but at least she seems happy to let me prove
I can't do it—and that is a good deal."48
Convinced that domesticity was important even if the full respon-
sibility for it oppressed women, the nineteenth-century advocates of
woman's rights wrestled with the issue. Who would do the domestic
work? We have seen that some of them came to positions that can
be called "material feminist." A few adopted openly elitist positions.
For example, a letter to the Woman's Journal in 1870 contended
that only those who have no vision beyond the kitchen should be
doing the housework. Bright women should aspire and drudges
should keep the home fires burning.49 In the 18705 there was an
efflorescence of serious discussion about how to achieve what we now
call a two-career household with Blackwell as "the most remarkable
and creative figure in the making of the new marital program."80
While some may have held positions that were not rigorously thought-
out, in general, many of these women were asking the right questions.
When we come to Gilman, however, we come to one whose loath-
ing for the home limited her ability to envision how domesticity and
justice for women could be compatible. Moreover, she shared Dar-
win's low estimation of the female contribution to human progress.
Indeed, the two attitudes were not unrelated. It was because she saw
so little positive in "home-making," insisting that what traditionally
have been women's tasks are not truly productive, that she could
dismiss female contributions so readily.
Gilman took from Ward the insight that in most of nature, except
for humankind, females are the more consequential gender, and
built on it. She cites an article in which he makes this argument that
appeared in the November 1888 issue of The Forum as being central
in the development of her own thought. "We are the only animal
species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only
animal species in which the sex-relation is also an economic rela-
tion."51 In becoming economically dependent on man, woman then
forfeited her ability to contribute to progress. "Back of history, at the
bottom of civilisation, untouched by a thousand whirling centuries,
the primitive woman, in the primitive home, still toils at her primitive
tasks."52
Like Ward a Lamarckian, Gilman assumed that the domestic en-
vironment endowed women with a hereditary taint. By this time, it
was known that both sexes inherit from both parents so that neither
she nor Ward made the same mistake as that made by Darwin and
Spencer, who argued that male struggle continues to upgrade men
alone. Rather, Gilman saw a kind of evolutionary see-saw operating
in which male activity tends toward human progress and enforced
female passivity toward retardation of the species: "This [the fact
that daughters inherit from fathers] has saved us from such a female
as the gypsy moth. It has set iron bounds to our absurd effort to
make a race with one sex a million years behind the other. . . . Each
woman born re-humanized by the current of race activity carried on
by her father and re-womanized by her traditional position, has had
to live over again in her own person the same process of restriction,
repression, denial. . . . All this human progress has been accom-
plished by men. Women have been left behind, outside, below, hav-
ing no social relation whatever, merely the sex-relation by which they
lived."53
Of course, the principal objection to this categorical denunciation
of woman's work would have to do with the importance of mother-
hood. Gilman acknowledged the possibility of such an objection and
then dismissed it by denigrating the value of a human mother's nur-
ture. She asserted that because the human female neither personally
obtains the food nor builds the shelter for her offspring she does less
for her young "than any other kind of mother on earth." Furthermore,
human young need more than "primitive," instinctual mothering:
they need instruction by qualified teachers. "So largely is this true
that it may be said in extreme terms that it would be better for a
child today to be left absolutely without mother or family of any
sort, in the city of Boston, for instance, than to be supplied with a
large and affectionate family and to be planted with them in Darkest
Africa."54 What a mother does for her family is to cater to their per-
sonal needs and tastes, and this is inherently a lesser undertaking
than one which is social in nature. "The 'sacred duties of maternity'
reproduce the race, but they do nothing to improve it."
Gilman's attack on the home extended even to the physical nature
of the structure itself: "Sewer gas invades the home; microbes, de-
structive insects, all diseases invade it also; so far as civilized life is
open to danger, the home is defenceless." Moreover, "modern thera-
peutics is now learning how many of our disorders of the throat and
lungs may be classified as house diseases."55 In short, she suggests
that staying too much at home may make a person sick.
Not only did Darwinism help to shape her estimate of woman's
work, but evolution also explained the primitive nature of the home
in her view. Rather than equating antiquity with value, she equated
it with datedness: the home is our oldest institution and perforce the
lowest and most out-of-date. To revere the home is as irrational an
act as ancestor-worship would be. If the home has improved at all,
this is only because men, with all of their restless energy, have been
at least slightly involved with it as it has changed, slightly, over time.
In her prescriptions for how to deal with housework, she owed a
1^2 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
great deal to Bellamy and Looking Backward. Like Bellamy she had
little appreciation of the way in which family meals can provide an
opportunity for emotional intimacy. Therefore she was more than
eager to remove as many of the remaining functions from the home
as possible, including cooking and dining. Further, in her strong de-
sire to get women out of the house, she went beyond what any of her
predecessors had said by attacking housewifely competence. Women
are not good cooks, she claimed, and never can be as long as they
are working merely to please their families, "with no incentive for
high achievement." Home cooking is predicated on ignorance, "the
habits of a dark, untutored past." There are no "aunties of high re-
pute" in this scenario, nor is there any respect for female domestic
prowess. Rather, Gilman darkly hints that home cooking may bear
part of the responsibility for "the diseases incidental to childhood."56
Even if the cooking makes no one ill, it will always be mediocre as
long as women consult their families' palates instead of the latest
scientific findings. Professional cooks would display no such senti-
mental weakness, she maintained. In the antebellum period, home
had been seen as valuable because it represented a counterweight to
the market. Fifty years later Gilman depicted it as hopelessly flawed
because it lacked market incentives and "business methods."
What are we to make of Oilman's analysis? That she had insights
of great power and originality respecting the consequences of woman's
economic dependence is incontrovertible. But, building on evolu-
tionary theory, she probably did more to separate the home from his-
tory, that is, to make the home seem to be a retrograde and irrelevant
institution, than any individual. It was not that Gilman herself had
large numbers of adherents for her program. Educated people were
acquainted with her ideas, however, as well as with the Darwinian
view of sexual selection, and the home began to seem like a senti-
mental embarrassment, not to be taken seriously. If educated men
reflected about the home at all, there was the reassuring thought that
a new discipline, home economics, had come into being to solve
domestic difficulties.
More than one scholar dealing with the Progressive period, when
Gilman's reputation was at its height, has used the word "rationaliza-
tion" to characterize the direction of change in the early twentieth

century. In many instances the term seems vague or empty. In this
instance, however, the term can be used with precision. Gilman saw
the responsibility for maintaining personal life as an important cause
of women's oppression. Therefore, she subjected the realm of the
domestic emotional life to her most rational scrutiny, paying lip
service to the idea that the home represents love and nurture but
demonstrating little appreciation for ways in which that role can be
fostered. In this regard she had much in common with other creators
of the "culture of professionalism." Work began to be valued most
when it was most abstract, most devoid of emotional content, most
male-oriented.57
Because the reconciliation of domesticity with justice for women
requires so much imagination and intelligence, we still lack all the
answers to how this may be accomplished. Indeed this reconciliation,
which also involves the relationship between personal life and social
obligations in a complex, technologically sophisticated society, will
require the best efforts of our best brains. It is regrettable that there
was a large gap in American history between the 18705 and the
19705, when almost no one gave the issue any thought. There were
those who cared about domesticity—the home economists—but they
had little claim to feminist credentials after the initial period. The
few feminists often proved that they were serious intellectuals by the
extent of their disdain for traditional female pursuits.
One who made an interesting, if unsuccessful, attempt at such a
reconciliation was Carrie Chapman Catt, in an article published in
1928. Catt begins by confidently predicting, in evolutionary terms,
"In another generation the woman who knows how to make bread or
an apple pie will be as extinct as a dodo." She points to the increasing
number of women in the work force and the unfair double burden
they have in carrying all the domestic responsibilities. Yet she won-
ders, "Will the home disappear in the impending ruin of the old
order?" On the one hand, she thinks that even if many women can
successfully juggle marriage and career, it is wrong that they should
have the functional equivalent of a baby on the back as in the old
days. On the other hand, clearly concerned about the disintegrative
forces at work in American society, she says that the "need of our
time" is "to preserve the home as long as possible." The best she can
do in mediating between these two priorities is to suggest that the
housewife limit her domestic activities to an eight-hour day.58 As
long as Catt was under the influence of the idea that evolution could
make the home virtually obsolete, she was unlikely to come up with
a more creative solution.
Men and women living in a modern secular society are under a
handicap in dealing with transcendent values. Darwinism helped
create a secular and materialist outlook. As a consequence, reflective
people now lack a vocabulary for talking about love, nurture, or the
social importance of home without sounding sentimental and faintly
ridiculous, a liability that did not affect our nineteenth-century fore-
bears.59 When Blackwell, for example, spoke of the "moral sanctities"
of home, she drew upon the tradition of Christian nurture, many
of the spokespeople for which belonged to the socially concerned
wing of American Protestantism. Conversely, the only people likely
to use the term in the 19805 would be the religious right. Thus the
epic style of domesticity, with its linkage of the home and the world
through the redemptive power of love, perished in the late nineteenth
century under the dual impact of economic upheaval and evolution-
ary theory. Rather than attracting the attention of creative and so-
cially engaged intellectuals of both sexes, the home increasingly be-
came the domain of technocrats and advertisers.
SIX
The Housewife and

the Home Economist
o 'N SEPTEMBER 19, 1899, eleven people gathered in Lake

Placid, New York, to set a formal seal on a development that had
been proceeding informally for several decades—the emergence of a
new discipline variously called domestic economy, domestic science,
and eventually home economics. No doubt the leading spirit at that
conference and, for the rest of her life, in the discipline itself, was
Ellen Swallow Richards. The only man in attendance was Melvil
Dewey, developer of the Dewey Decimal System. Another well-
known name was that of Maria Parloa, author of a popular cookbook.
Although their numbers were few, those in attendance had an am-
bitious agenda. They chose the name "home economics" for the new
discipline. They then discussed how to publicize and popularize it
and how to include it in curricula at all levels of education. It is note-
worthy that this conference coincided almost exactly with the birth
of the Progressive Era, a period when Americans throughout the
country and at all levels of government sought reform that would
enable their society to deal with the new urban-industrial order.
Thoroughly imbued with the Progressive ethos and full of good in-
tentions with respect to the home, those who attended the Lake
Placid conference nonetheless set a process in motion by which the
'45
devaluation of the female craft tradition, an important component

of the ideology of domesticity, was greatly accelerated. This was be-
cause, in order to establish their own profession as worthy, they per-
force needed to denigrate the quality of housewifely competence. In
this way, what Harry Braverman has called the "division of hand
and brain" was carried forward in the home as well as in the male-
oriented workplace.
Usually recognized as the founding mother of home economics—
unless that title should go to Catharine Beecher—Ellen Richards had
a career that demonstrates just how circumscribed the choices avail-
able to women were in the late nineteenth century. Born in 1842,
she entered Vassar College at the age of twenty-five, where she
studied astronomy with Maria Mitchell, the leading American
woman scientist of the nineteenth century. After graduating from
Vassar, Richards entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
as a special student in chemistry, the only woman student to be en-
rolled. Clearly, her presence was uncomfortable for the administra-
tion because they admitted her without charge so as to camouflage
the fact that she was studying there. In 1873 s^e obtained both a
baccalaureate of science from MIT and a master of arts degree from
Vassar. Despite the fact that she studied another two years at MIT—
and did distinguished work—she was never deemed to be an appro-
priate candidate for a doctorate.
When she developed an interest in applied chemistry, such as
studying sources of pollution in the home, it was easier for the scien-
tific world to deal with her. Whereas a woman scientist was almost
unthinkable, a woman devoted to cleaning up the domestic environ-
ment was not violating any norms respecting the two spheres. The
young Ellen Swallow had already shown a willingness to accommo-
date cultural norms by keeping needles and pins on hand so as to
mend for various professors at MIT. On February n, 1871, she
wrote, "I am winning a way which others will keep open. Perhaps
the fact that I am not a Radical or a believer in the all-powerful
ballot for woman to right her wrongs and that I do not scorn womanly
duties, but claim it as a privilege to clean up and sort of supervise the
room and sew things, etc. is winning me stronger allies than any-
THE HOUSEWIFE AND THE HOME ECONOMIST 147
thing else."1 Happily for her, in 1875 she married Robert Hallowell
Richards, a metallurgist who was sympathetic to her scientific ambi-
tions, and with whom she collaborated early in the marriage. In
1884, MIT established a chemical laboratory for the study of sanita-
tion, and Ellen Richards received the position of instructor in sanitary
chemistry, a post she held until her death in 1911. During that pe-
riod she published a number of important books on the subject of
sanitation and the home.
Other pioneer home economists took a similar route. Of a slightly
later generation than Richards, Isabel Bevier (b. 1860) studied
chemistry at a number of the leading institutions in the country, in-
cluding MIT, where she worked with Richards. With these creden-
tials, Bevier spent a brief time as a professor of chemistry at Lake
Erie College for women, where she was expected to plan the menus.
She was to spend more than two decades at the University of Illinois
and to become one of the best-known home economists in the coun-
try, perhaps the best known after Richards's death. Nonetheless, she
came to the field because Professor Albert W. Smith of Case School
of Applied Science told her that "the place for women in chemistry
was in food chemistry." After receiving the appointment at Illinois,
she had to make it clear to the administration that "fine cooking was
not in my repertoire."2
Another home economist was Marion Talbot (1858-1948). Like
Bevier, she studied with Richards at MIT. Obtaining her baccalau-
reate of science in 1888, she briefly taught domestic science at Welles-
ley. For most of her distinguished career, however, she was asso-
ciated with the University of Chicago, as dean of undergraduate
women between 1899 and 1905 and then as head of the department
of household administration. What is especially remarkable is that
Talbot, a fighter against sexual segregation in higher education, none-
theless found herself administering a sex-specific department. She
had originally hoped that sanitary science and public health would
be at the center of the agenda for reforming American cities. By
1912 she had given up this hope and asked William Rainey Harper,
president of the university, to create a department devoted to the
study of the household and to put her in charge. Sanitary science had
14% JUST A HOUSEWIFE
been part of the department of sociology and the subject of study by

both men and women. Household administration was, for all intents
and purposes, for women only. In a sense she was yielding to the
inevitable because she was already receiving a steady stream of letters
from state universities asking that she recommend women as teachers
of home economics.3
The early home economists, then, including Richards, Bevier, and
Talbot, thought they were establishing a beachhead for women in
science in the American university system. In a sense they were, but
they created little opportunity for women outside of home economics,
except in the women's colleges. Says the most distinguished student
of women scientists, Margaret Rossiter, "[Home economics] was the
only field where a woman scientist could hope to be a full professor,
department chairman, or even a dean in the 19205 or i93os."4
Thus an important component, perhaps the most important, of the
new discipline was the pool of talented and college-educated women
who wanted to be scientists but were only allowed the opportunity
to pursue this career if they applied science to the domestic sphere.
Another important component was the birth of the land grant col-
lege. In 1862 Congress passed the Morrill Act, designed to encourage
the study of the agricultural and mechanical arts. As the institutions
set up under the Morrill Act began to introduce coeducation, it was
not surprising that administrators set up domestic science courses for
their women students. In the 18705 such courses appeared in Iowa,
Kansas, and Illinois. By 1900 there were thirty departments in the
country, chiefly associated with land grant colleges. Indeed, Godey's
had launched a campaign to achieve this goal soon after the passage
of the Morrill Act and had called for "National Normal Schools and
Seminaries of Household Science for young women." Sarah Josepha
Hale contended, "Every young woman there trained would learn to
serve God and her country, to love her home and the duties that
make the beauty, the happiness, and the glory of home."8
Yet another component of the new discipline was the growing
popularity of the urban cooking school. In March 1867, Godey's
noted that Professor Blot of Paris was currently lecturing to women
in the largest American cities. By the following decade there were
regularly established cooking schools in New York, Boston, and

Philadelphia. Maria Parloa, in attendance at the first Lake Placid
conference, was associated with the Boston Cooking School. In the
18905 Ellen Richards and others founded the New England Kitchen,
designed both to provide nutritious and reasonably priced meals for
working-class families and to give cooking lessons. This particular
experiment failed because the families, largely immigrant, proved
resistant to Yankee cuisine. Nonetheless, there were enough middle-
class women who either wanted to study cooking themselves or to
hire servants so trained that the cooking schools became successful,
and a similar success was ensured for the cookbooks that came out
of these ventures.
Finally, the late nineteenth-century fairs, in particular the Cen-
tennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia and the World's Colum-
bian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, provided excellent opportunities
to demonstrate the developments in domestic science. Richards her-
self singled out the Philadelphia Exposition as an occasion "when
America was awakened to its own deficiencies in the culinary art,
and in home furnishing and decoration among other things."6 Two
decades later the New England Kitchen, a failure in its immediate
purpose, led directly to the Rumford Kitchen at the World's Colum-
bian Exposition. Administered by Richards as part of the Massachu-
setts exhibit, the Rumford Kitchen featured lunches whose food
values had been carefully calculated and specified on a menu. "The
Rumford Kitchen was the first attempt to demonstrate by simple
methods to the people in general the meaning of the terms proteids,
carbohydrates, calories, and the fact there are scientific principles
underlying nutrition."7
Most of these developments can in a sense be traced to the influ-
ence of Catharine Beecher's Treatise on Domestic Economy. Lacking
the access to higher education enjoyed by those born fifty and more
years later than she (Beecher had been born in 1800), she nonethe-
less attempted to give the most up-to-date information possible, based
on her understanding of chemistry, horticulture, and other technical
matters. Inasmuch as she firmly believed that well-trained women
teachers should instruct other women in the household arts, the
urban cooking schools and the programs at state universities would

doubtless have met with her approval.
Nonetheless, when one studies Beecher's work in conjunction with
the writings of the pioneer home economists, one may well be more
struck by the differences than by the similarities. This phenomenon
can be explained by the changes in American society, many of which
we have already discussed, that had taken place between 1841 and
1899, the year of the first Lake Placid conference. Briefly stated, by
1900 the authority of science had gone a long way toward replacing
the authority of religion. Therefore, although the home economists
at the turn of the century nodded in the direction of the "value" of
home, for most of them the real interest lay in technique. It should
be recalled that Beecher, for all her interest in technique, had begun
her Treatise with lengthy extracts from Tocqueville and a philo-
sophically oriented discussion of what home could and should do for
the larger society. Moreover, even if Beecher wanted to improve the
practice of housewifery, she cast relatively few aspersions on contem-
porary housewives. Many of the turn-of-the-century home economists,
on the other hand, launched attacks on housewifely competence that
bore a strong resemblance to those of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
In fact, the birth of home economics as a discipline can only be
understood as part of the larger pattern of the development of the
culture of professionalism in the late nineteenth century. Clearly,
the home economists faced a challenge because professions were up-
grading themselves by excluding amateurs, by denning themselves
as "manly" in a variety of ways, and by emphasizing the abstract over
the concrete. If their discipline were to be a profession at all, they
would do best to emulate existing male professions. The most impor-
tant step was to distance themselves from that lowly amateur, the
housewife. Another was to attempt to rationalize as many household
processes as possible as well as to set standards against which actual
practice could be measured. Hence the differences in tone between
Beecher and her successors.8 Hence, too, the deleterious impact of
the home economists on the female craft tradition.
An examination of the proceedings of the Lake Placid confer-
ences—there were ten in all, culminating with the founding of the
American Home Economics Association in 1908—will demonstrate

how the pioneers set about their task. One of the most clear-cut
themes to emerge is the importance of overruling the palate—what
the family likes—in favor of nutrition—what experts deem to be good
for people. A favorite device was to imply that there was something
suspiciously sensual—and not at all scientific!—about a too-enthusiastic
enjoyment of food. "The "breaking of bread' is a universal sacrament
and it is given to men primarily for the strengthening of their bodies,
not for the gratification of their palates." Choosing food on the basis
of whim or habit or because it tastes good will lead people away from
the "higher life," according to another author.9 Yet another set a most
unusual standard for good food: the less memorable the better. "It is
a great waste of time to spend several hours preparing an elaborate
dish which will be eaten in fifteen minutes, and after that time will
not make the partaker any happier. The test of good food is to have
no reminder of it after eating."10
Of course, personal preferences are inherently anarchic. If the
goal was to set standards, then people had to be taught not to trust
their own tastes. Further, if people were to follow the advice of ex-
perts, they had to be taught to despise tradition and the advice of
older women. Both of these themes emerge in the Lake Placid pro-
ceedings. One author complained, "There is absolutely no standard
existing." Yet her committee had concluded that there was "willing-
ness to accept a standard from an authority on the subject," especially
among younger housewives.11 Ellen Richards herself was frequently
given to attacking the weight of tradition. She worried that "the tra-
ditions of the past bind us with bands of steel." Summing up ten
years of these conferences, she said, "Tradition has held longer sway
over home life than over even religious life. . . . Knowledge to make
the necessary changes could come only from the outside where in-
vestigations were being carried on, and tradition forebade the house
mother to go outside to learn."12 Therefore, the only way that benefi-
cent change could come to the home was through the instrumen-
tality of the outside expert.
Faith in the capacities of the expert was one characteristic of the
Progressive generation; another was a reforming zeal dedicated to
IJ2 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
overhauling a broad range of institutions and practices. That the

pioneering home economists were imbued with the spirit that under-
lay Progressive reform is clear from the sheer scope of what they
were trying to accomplish. They wanted to help the housewife by
simplifying housekeeping. They wanted to train teachers. They
wanted to prepare brochures for dissemination by the federal gov-
ernment. They wanted to establish an outreach to farmers' wives.
They wanted to study the ways in which standards of living are
affected by sanitary science. Yet the scope of what they were attempt-
ing also betrays the confusion that underlay the founding of the dis-
cipline: was its primary purpose to provide manual training for
women or was it to study nutrition and sanitation in a non-sex-specific
fashion? Both of these objectives showed up at the Lake Placid con-
ferences.13 In 1902, Marion Talbot tried to resolve the confusion by
arguing that manual training for girls should take place in trade
schools, and college courses should be open to both men and women.
Nothing came of this suggestion at the time, however.
Thus, the best way to understand home economics is to see it as
a combination of elements derived from Catharine Beecher along
with elements of the nascent professional ethos and elements of Pro-
gressivism. Despite the focus on technique, for example, some of the
pioneers did try to draw on broad general culture and to invest the
housewife role with a social dimension. A course syllabus from 1895
prepared by Helen Campbell includes references to works by Lester
Frank Ward, William Morris, John Ruskin, Ellen Richards, Have-
lock Ellis, and many more. Yet most of the topics listed really fall into
the area of technique: The Building of the House, Decoration,
Furnishing, Food and Its Preparation, and Cleaning and Its Pro-
cesses. We may note parenthetically that Campbell's career pattern
provides further evidence for the contention that the discipline of
home economics came into being in large part because talented
women were invariably ascribed to studying the home. Campbell
received graduate training in economics from Richard Ely at Wiscon-
sin yet received no doctorate and never had a stable academic job.14
She then turned to domestic science or home economics and wrote
extensively.
Of the pioneering generation, Marion Talbot had perhaps the

clearest vision of what home economics could and should be and
what it should not be. In a book co-authored with Sophonisba Breck-
inridge, an important member of the Chicago reform community, the
two women argued forcefully for the social potential of the house-
wife's role as consumer. They began by pointing out that many
prophets were predicting that the home and family would not en-
dure as then constituted. Yet while some tasks had already left the
home, a new one had crept in that was of overweening importance-
intelligent consumption: "The woman who administers the affairs of
a household may well regard herself as placed at the real heart of
things. . . ." As an example of how she might function, she could
look for the union label when buying clothes for the family. "And
so the duty of selecting wearing apparel for the members of her group
becomes an opportunity of the richest kind."15 The home economist's
task thus became that of alerting her to these ramifications.
At a time when the model of scientific management captured the
imagination of many middle-class Americans, Talbot and Breckin-
ridge rejected this model as inappropriate for the home. They argued
that "the household is not a form of organization whose purpose is
pecuniary profit."16 It is, therefore and of necessity, less efficient than
a business enterprise. The clear message of the book became one of
trying to direct the discipline away from technique for its own sake
and toward the study of the home in relationship to the larger society.
As it happened, however, most members of the Progressive genera-
tion, including home economists, were uncritically infatuated with
scientific management. Says Samuel Haber, one of the leading stu-
dents of the subject:
The progressive era is almost made to order for the study of

Americans in love with efficiency. For the progressive era gave
rise to an efficiency craze—a secular Great Awakening, an out-
pouring of ideas and emotions in which a gospel of efficiency
was preached without embarrassment to businessmen, workers,
doctors, housewives, and teachers, and yes, preached even to
preachers. Men as disparate as William Jennings Bryan and
Walter Lippmann discoursed enthusiastically on efficiency. Ef-
ficient and good came closer to meaning the same thing in these
years than in any other period of American history. . . . An
efficient person was an effective person, and that characteriza-
tion brought with it a long shadow of latent associations and
pre-dispositions; a turning toward hard work and away from
feeling, toward discipline and away from sympathy, toward
masculinity and away from femininity.17
Fundamental to scientific management was the capture by effi-

ciency experts of expertise that had previously been part of the
workers' own craft tradition. Another student of scientific manage-
ment, Harry Braverman, documents the way in which these experts
set about their work. Quoting long extracts from Frederick Taylor,
the father of scientific management, Braverman demonstrates that
the first such experts to be employed in factories set out to destroy a
worker's faith in his or her own judgment. The expert or the manager
should do the brain work, according to this theory, and the worker's
job should be as fully rationalized and programmed as possible. The
fewer the wasted motions, the greater the worker's productivity, and
ultimately the greater the employer's profit. According to Braverman,
the key issue is control. The more fully rationalized the work in any
given workplace, the less autonomy each worker has, and the more
manipulable he or she becomes.18
Although the same motives could not have inspired the pioneer
home economists, who dealt with isolated workers outside the cash
nexus (the use made of their work is another matter and will be dis-
cussed in the next chapter), it is striking to see the extent to which
their methods paralleled those of the Taylorites. If Taylor hammered
away at the intelligence and judgment of Schmidt, the pig-iron
handler he was retraining,19 the home economists frequently did the
same to the housewife. Helen Campbell, for example, shared Char-
lotte Perkins Gilman's critique of the abilities of the average house-
wife. (The two were, in fact, close friends.) Like Gilman, she had
an evolutionary perspective. Women, isolated in the home, were
isolated, too, from human progress. Those advances that have been
made in the home have come through the instrumentality of men.
Speaking of cookery, she contended, "The main reason that our
household cuisine shows any advance over that of the primitive sav-
age is, that some men have become cooks, and developed the function
and its essential machinery." If women were to have their way, there
would never be any improvement. "There are many of these domes-
tic industries still almost as rude and primitive as in the beginning.
. . . Even the intelligent housekeeper still talks about 'luck with
her sponge cake!' Luck! There is no such word in science, and to
make sponge cake is a scientific process!" So severe are women's defi-
ciencies, thought Campbell, that there is a "blank wall between
women and true progress erected chiefly by their own hands and
bearing at intervals such mottoes as Blessed be Drudgery!"20
As if all this were not enough, Campbell also disparaged a house-
wife's competence with respect to the physical care of the house itself.
In the first place, whatever innate taste she might have possessed had
been blighted: "The average woman's life is so spent in conflicting
interests and industries that she cannot develop any true taste for large
truths of relation." In the second place the home was potentially so
filthy that she was likely to be fighting a losing battle just to keep it
clean. Campbell cited research conducted by Ellen Richards in which
a pinpoint of dust was taken from the top of a dining-room door:
"Out of this pin-point of dust grew three thousand living organisms,
not all malignant, but all enemies of health." All one had to do was
to compare hospitals with the average home and one would soon
realize how primitive was the approach to cleanliness. For every
spotless New England home, there were all too many less desirable
examples, as instanced in "the frowsy shiftlessness of the poor white
in the South or in the workman's home of the North."21
Campbell's approach was far from unique. Gilman had argued
that housewifely backwardness might contribute to the infant mor-
tality rate. While not going that far, Isabel Bevier did hint that the
family's health could suffer from a mother's ignorance:
Happily the days are passing when the feeling prevails that
"anyone can keep house." We have been a long time in learn-
ing that housekeeping is a profession for which intelligent
preparation is demanded. The woman who attempts to usurp
the authority of the trained nurse in charge of the patient does
so at the risk of the patient's life. Results quite as disastrous to

the life of the household may be expected from the woman
ignorant of the first principles of household management and
care.22
In this view, the authority belongs by right to the scientifically

trained expert. The housewife who ignores that expert's advice and
"usurps the authority" can be held responsible for any mishaps that
may occur—perhaps occasioned by one of Richards's three thousand
microbes. Only a very brave woman could ignore this onslaught and
adhere to a belief in her own methods. Moreover, even those who
escaped home economics courses per se were unlikely to escape the
onslaught entirely because it pervaded the women's magazines, too.
Another influential treatise of the Progressive Era, tellingly titled
Increasing Home Efficiency, was written by Martha and Robert
Bruere. In this book the Brueres espoused what might be called a
New Nationalist approach to home economics, because they clearly
had been influenced by Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly's theo-
ries about the value of large-scale enterprise. For example, in a chap-
ter entitled "A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts," they argued
that breaking up the trusts might impede the growth in abundance
for all Americans and therefore that housewives should oppose trust-
busting. Above all they emphasized the value of the expert, in this
case a domestic science teacher who became a "housekeeper":
It is a desirable condition based on knowledge of housekeep-

ing—ordered knowledge gained from experts in school, and in
startling contrast to the wisdom of "mother," who was
equipped for the business of teaching with nothing better than
tradition, devotion to her home, humility as to what she had a
right to demand in the way of mechanical assistance or finan-
cial compensation, and especially with a firm and disastrous
conviction that her own experience, however limited, was an
infallible guide.23
Indeed, the housewife had an obligation to be as well trained as

possible because she owed her family and her society the utmost in
efficiency: "In a word the one answer to many questions is that the
middle-class mother must stop soldiering on the job."24 This is a re-

vealing turn of phrase because "soldiering" was the term used to
characterize the activities of the deliberately unproductive factory
worker. Thus we see a very clear manifestation of the linkages be-
tween scientific management and home economics.
Perhaps the clearest linkage was manifested in the collaboration
between Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. Frank, with Taylor, was one
of the leading industrial engineers of the early twentieth century.
His wife Lillian shared his work and then carried it on by herself
after his death. Their collaboration extended to the domestic realm,
too, where they tried to run their household of twelve children ac-
cording to the best scientific principles. Frank had carried out motion
studies of factory workers. In a book published after his death,
Lillian suggested that family members collaborate to determine how
best and most efficiently to perform domestic tasks. With careful
study, procedures could be evolved in such a way as to be used even
by a guest who might be helping out.25 Lillian Gilbreth's earnest
exposition of such matters might lead one to envision a rather joyless
household. Happily, we know from the memoir, Cheaper by the
Dozen, written by two of their twelve children, that the Gilbreths'
devotion to efficiency was leavened by a certain amount of humor.
In any event the Gilbreths' research has had long-lasting conse-
quences. In a subsequent memoir written in 1970, Frank, Jr., spoke
of his mother's enormous influence on the design of household ap-
pliances: "every washing machine, kitchen stove, and refrigerator that
rolls off the assembly lines today bears the imprint of her research."26
Thus, home economics was a quintessential Progressive program,
especially in its faith in the power of experts. By the second decade
of the twentieth century it had gained legitimacy as a discipline well
suited for women in the opinion of most Americans. It was taught
at all levels of education; it had a professional association; a publica-
tion, the Journal of Home Economics, devoted to disseminating re-
search; and a growing body of literature. In 1916, 17,778 students
were enrolled in home economics courses in 195 institutions of
higher education.27 Moreover, certain developments of these years
heightened the popularity of the field. The passage of the Smith-
Lever Act of 1914 was especially significant. Using the land grant
colleges, this act set up a network of cooperative extension courses
for those women who were not regularly enrolled in a college or
university. As early as 1917 some 27,000 students attended 450 ex-
tension courses.28 Finally, the First World War, brief as American
participation might have been, made many housewives receptive to
expert advice. Owing to wartime exigencies, patriotic households
were being urged to forgo meat on specified days and, therefore,
families needed to alter their diets. According to an early historian
of home economics, the result was an enormous popularity for such
government pamphlets, published by the Department of Agriculture,
as "Do You Know Corn Meal?," "Save Sugar," "A Whole Dinner
in One Dish," "Choose Your Food Wisely," and "Wheatless Bread
and Cakes," each of which was sent to one million homes.29
As a consequence of all these changes, in July 1923 the federal
government established the Bureau of Home Economics as a part of
the Department of Agriculture. Something of the broad-based sup-
port for this undertaking is indicated by the range of women's groups
that participated in the preliminary planning conference. Among the
participants were representatives from the newly established League
of Women Voters, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the
PTA (Parent-Teachers Association), the WCTLJ, the American
Association of University Women, and the American Home Eco-
nomics Association.30 Nonetheless, as with the Lake Placid confer-
ences, the early history of the Bureau indicates a certain confusion
of goals. Its announced functions were twofold: "to study practical
home problems and in this manner aid in improving and bettering
living conditions," and "to study the relative utility and economy of
agricultural products for food, clothing, and other uses in the
home. . . ,"31 Purpose number one implied that the Bureau was
assuming a responsibility for all housewives as consumers. Purpose
number two, on the other hand, implied that the Bureau was going
to look out for the interests of the agricultural producers. It was,
after all, part of the Department of Agriculture. That the two pur-
poses might have been fundamentally in conflict seems not to have
troubled people at the time. Another potential conflict soon surfaced
concerning the approach to values. At the planning conference, the

Secretary of Agriculture reported on the scope of what the new Bu-
reau hoped to accomplish, and the women responded that they
would like to see more emphasis on the spiritual aspects of home life.
Shortly thereafter, a paper presented to the Association of Land
Grant Colleges argued that with the new bureau, home economics
could become just as empirically based as any other science.32
The establishment of a federal agency devoted to home economics
was the culmination of decades of struggle for acceptance and legiti-
macy by partisans of the new discipline. The Bureau of Home Eco-
nomics, established nearly forty years before John F. Kennedy created
his precedent-setting Commission on the Status of Women, was a
welcome indication that the federal government was planning to
continue to take an interest in women after the passage of the Nine-
teenth Amendment in 1920. Yet the new field never came close to
fulfilling the high hopes of its founders, let alone the expectations of
many women's groups, that had reached an apogee in the early twen-
ties after the founding of the Bureau.
In evaluating the impact of home economics and attempting to
comprehend why people with so much goodwill failed to raise the
status of the home, we must first acknowledge that there were im-
portant positive components of the discipline. It must be clearly un-
derstood that home economics represented one of the ways by which
women attempted to carve out a place for themselves in the male-
dominated world of work. Had men been more willing to accept
women in the academy, especially in the sciences, there would have
been less need for pioneer home economists to denigrate housewives
in order to set themselves apart from their sisters and thereby define
themselves as worthy of inclusion among male professionals. Let it
be remembered, further, that the pioneers were working and writing
in the shadow of Darwin. If they attempted to advance themselves
by attacking housewifely competence, they were drawing upon the
most widely held scientific tenets of the day about the impossibility
of progress coming to the home through the efforts of house-bound
women.
Moreover, there were many who hoped that the consumer func-
l6o JUST A HOUSEWIFE
tion possessed enough importance that it would provide an entering

wedge enabling women to advance the cause of social justice. It is
easy to see how this could be congruent with domestic feminism,
that is, with the idea that their domestic duties give women special
moral qualities and a special claim to influence in American society.
Most of the important home economists of the first generation had
ties to reformers in other sectors of Amercan society, men and women
who were wrestling with the problem of how to humanize an indus-
trial society, many of whom firmly believed that women had a special
role to play. An extant program for the first public meeting of the
Chicago Household Economic Society, for example, shows that the
speakers included Helen Campbell, Marion Talbot, Jane Addams,
and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.33 The later image of the home econ-
omist as "Betty Crocker," telling housewives what to buy, distorts
the picture of the profession when it first emerged.
A brief examination of the career of Caroline Hunt will give an
especially clear example of how closely home economics was related
to the larger reform community in the early twentieth century. A
professor of home economics at the University of Wisconsin between
1903 and 1908 (after having done graduate work in chemistry at
the University of Chicago), Hunt became well acquainted with
members of the leading Progressive family in the state, the La Fol-
lettes. For four years she wrote a regular column, "Home and Educa-
tion," for La Follette's magazine. That she seasoned her domestic
advice with a concern for social justice is revealed in the table bless-
ing she wrote for the January 30, 1909, issue: "Humbly Recognizing
as one of the Mysteries of Life the fact that we have Food and in
Abundance while others worthier far than we, and even Little Chil-
dren, Starve or Go Hungry, we would learn to use effectively the
Strength of Mind and Body obtained from this food in the effort to
secure a Fairer Distribution of Life's Material Blessings." After Ellen
Richards died in 1911, Hunt wrote what has been the standard biog-
raphy of Richards. Later, when the Bureau of Home Economics
came into being, Hunt went to work there and became one of the
key staff members for Louise Stanley, the first director of the Bu-
reau. Finally, when Hunt died in 1927, Belle La Follette wrote the
THE HOUSEWIFE AND THE HOME ECONOMIST l6l
eulogy, and the funeral took place at Jane Addams's Hull House.34
Hunt's life and work demonstrate how misleading it would be to
emphasize only the scientific management aspect of home economics.
Whether the profession helped the urban woman very much is de-
batable. That the profession was genuinely helpful for rural women
seems evident, however. By the first decades of the twentieth century,
the nature of the housewife's job in the countryside was vastly dif-
ferent from what it was in a city. For example, a farmer's wife might
find herself cooking for a dozen threshers at certain times of the
year. She was much less likely than her city sister to have modern
conveniences such as a gas stove or running water. Because the job
was so demanding, the advice to farm women given by Nellie Kedzie
Jones in her column in The Country Gentleman between 1912 and
1916 was very different in tone from that directed to an urban au-
dience—more practical and less patronizing. Where Lillian Gilbreth
was to suggest that a child follow his mother around with thread so
that she could eliminate wasted motion, Jones had much less esoteric
goals in mind:
With hired men at your table, make up your mind to three
hearty meals every day in the year. [The columns were di-
rected to an imaginary niece.] I know the prospect is appalling
to one who is doing her own work, as you are; but face the
fact, prepare for the worst, and any respite you may get later
count as pure gain. Most of the writing of recipes, the esti-
mates of quantities for families of various sizes, and marketing
directions, have been done by Home-Economics experts who
have gotten their data from colleges, public institutions, city
homes and city eating places, but not from farms. They are
too small for farm conditions. Add about fifty per cent to the
usual standard recipe, or even double it and you will not be
far off. From the hired man's point of view a short ration is the
unpardonable sin. He believes that a pie ought not to be cut
into more than four pieces. I get round that difficulty, though,
by often serving easy puddings.35
It is not difficult to understand why a woman faced with work as de-

manding as Jones posits would be grateful for advice from the coop-
erative extension home economist. In this instance, the rationalizing

of work processes might preserve the health of someone whose work
load would otherwise be overwhelming.
Finally, it is obvious that in one of its incarnations, that of non-
sex-specific sanitary and nutritional science, home economics be-
longed to an important development of the early twentieth century—
the growth in knowledge about and improvement in the practice of
public health, whereby the life expectancy of Americans made dra-
matic gains. If the average woman's life expectancy went from 45
in 1900 to 78 in 1985, then the sanitation experts must receive a
large measure of credit. Ellen Richards may not have created many
opportunities for women scientists despite her best efforts, but her
research and the research of some of the other pioneers unquestion-
ably prolonged lives.
Having said all this, we can now turn to the opposite side of the
coin. The most fundamental criticism to be made of home economics
is that it was a giant step backward with respect to sexual symmetry.
The fascination with the scientific method was so strong that it could
unite women as dissimilar in their ideal of home as Ellen Richards
and Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the quest for purely technological
solutions to the housewife's problems, thus moving away from the
larger issue of the equitable distribution of domestic labor. Most of
the pioneers believed that a woman's place is in the home, that home
duties belong uniquely to women, and that their own research would
make the status quo more palatable to women. Lillian Gilbreth went
so far as to state, "This book makes no appeal for 'kitchen husbands'
or 'kitchen sons.' . . ,"36 It was as if the ferment of the 18705, with
Antoinette Brown Blackwell as the most imaginative thinker ponder-
ing the possibilities for shared domestic responsibilities, had never
taken place. Even those who believed it appropriate for a woman to
take a public role or to be gainfully employed outside the home
thought that home economics research, plus the removal of ever
more functions from the home, could solve her problems without
having to reorganize gender relations. In essence, men were let off
the hook. Given the increasing trivialization of the home as an in-
stitution, it was unlikely that men would seek to challenge this

situation.
The very closeness between Progressives and home economists that
gave the new discipline its social dimension in the early years also
meant that home economists would share in some of the less desirable
characteristics of the Progressives, such as their Anglo-Saxonism.
Whatever else the Progressive movement may have been—and for
the foreseeable future, historians will be trying to define the move-
ment with precision—it was in part a reaction to the millions of im-
migrants from southern and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth
century—men and women who clustered in cities and seemed to be
less assimilable than earlier waves of immigrants. Middle-class Amer-
cans reacted to them with a complicated mixture of alarm, disdain,
and a certain compassion.37 What was rarely present was any kind of
cultural relativism. Typical of this outlook was the Yankee home
economists' assumption, as manifested in the New England Kitchen,
that they could suggest a diet for immigrants that would be "better"
than the immigrants' own cuisine. When ethnocentrism was wedded
to the pervasive biological reductionism of the late nineteenth cen-
tury, the result was the widespread interest in eugenics, the science
of improving the qualities of the human race by the careful selection
of parents. That Ellen Richards's favorite name for her new disci-
pline when taught as part of the college curriculum was "euthenics"
shows that she, along with millions of her fellow Americans, regarded
it and eugenics as perfectly legitimate topics of research,38 the former
pointing the way to better living and the latter to an improved race.
Sincere desire to improve social conditions often coexisted with
contempt for ordinary people—workers, housewives, immigrants—in
the minds of Progressive reformers, including home economists. This
explains the appeal of the expert and the desire to apply "scientific"
knowledge to areas of life that had hitherto been matters of common
sense. Thus, in addition to Anglo-Saxonism, elitism was a very char-
acteristic attitude of Progressives, an attitude that the home econo-
mists fully shared.
The frequent attacks on tradition, individual taste, and common
sense as bases for domestic practice are clear evidence of the over-
arching elitism. When applied to cookery, this approach had espe-
cially unfortunate consequences. Without doubt, one of the most
negative elements of the impact of home economics on women and
all Americans, for that matter, has been an alienation from trust in
one's own tastebuds. Throughout most of the twentieth century
Americans have been warned that such trust is a bad idea because
"unscientific." As we shall learn in the next chapter, the person so
instructed becomes much easier to sell to—as advertisers learned to
their profit. In a memorable if polemical phrase, John and Karen
Hess refer to "the rape of the palate" whereby Americans "have
grown so accustomed to mass-produced, artificially flavored foods that
anything else tastes peculiar."39 In this process, home economists
played a big role because they set out to destroy good taste as a cri-
terion of the American diet.
Lest it be thought that experts were merely trying to save women
time and work, we can consider the subject of coffee. Several gener-
ations ago women routinely roasted and ground the coffee beans im-
mediately before brewing coffee. It then became possible to purchase
roasted coffee beans at a store, a savings of time for the housewife
with no great loss of flavor in the taste of coffee as long as she was
able to procure reasonably fresh beans. Enter the food-processing
companies, and Americans were taught to buy canned, vacuum-
packed, pre-ground coffee. This was more modern and hence more
desirable. As increasing numbers of Americans have traveled to
Europe in the postwar years, however, they have encountered a bev-
erage very different from the usual American variety. It is now
possible to buy whole beans in most American cities of any size, and
many Americans have discovered that they can make coffee, akin to
the European model, that costs no more money and very little more
effort than the canned variety. One can speculate that only people
who had been coaxed away from trusting their own tastebuds in the
first place could have been persuaded to drink so flavorless a brew as
the typical American coffee made from canned, ground beans.
Another negative consequence of the shrill attacks on the female
craft tradition has to do with the declining status of the aging woman
in the twentieth-century United States. Growing old is never easy,
but some societies honor the wisdom of their elders more than do
others. As we have seen, Harriet Beecher Stowe had celebrated the
collective expertise of "aunties of high repute" in her New England
novels. In fact, older women were the repositories of community wis-
dom respecting domesticity in the nineteenth century. If there was
one theme that was universal in the writings of the pioneer home
economists, however, it was disdain for such expertise. Blue-collar
male workers have had to contend with similar attitudes owing to
industrial engineering, but at least some men have had access to the
type of job in which age is likelier to be seen as an asset—judge, for
example. Until recently, such access was impossible for women. As a
consequence, the decades "between menopause and death," to use
Erma Bombeck's phrase, seem to have become much more prob-
lematic for older housewives than they had been in the nineteenth
century.
Because they were trying to construct a model of a fully rational-
ized, scientific discipline out of materials that did not always lend
themselves to the endeavor—domestically oriented emotions and val-
ues, and a craft tradition—the home economists not infrequently
found themselves engaged in what can only be called a reductio ad
absurdum approach to domesticity. Two pieces of evidence can be
adduced to support this generalization although many others doubt-
less exist. In 1927, The Farmer's Wife decided to try to identify five
"master home-makers" in each state where they could secure cooper-
ation. People were supposed to nominate candidates, who would then
be sent a forty-five-page work-sheet to fill out. The nominee was sup-
posed to sketch the floor plan of her kitchen, reveal whether any
member of her family suffered regularly from constipation, discuss
the sleeping habits of her children, and list her ten favorite labor-
saving devices, among other items. In a similar vein, a workbook
from a home economics class in 1932, evidently a college-level course
in home economics education, gives drills for opening and closing a
sewing bag and using a thimble. This is the sewing bag drill:
1. Open the bag.

2. Take out work.
3. Arrange work on the desk.
4. Hold up the work.40
Finally, in assessing the impact of home economics on women, it
seems evident that tying the discipline so closely to land grant col-
leges and the Department of Agriculture has made it appear to be
part of an outmoded, rural past as the twentieth century has ad-
vanced and the American population has become increasingly urban/
suburban in composition. This, in turn, may have helped to give
domesticity itself an old-fashioned image for young women outside
rural areas, who would nonetheless find their own later lives en-
meshed in domesticity.
Having drawn up a balance sheet, then, we see that home eco-
nomics was perhaps the major mode by which ,the culture of profes-
sionalism could accommodate the aspirations of women in the early
twentieth century. But because the underlying assumptions of the
culture of professionalism were antagonistic to what the home had
stood for at the height of its esteem in the mid-nineteenth century,
it was impossible for home economists to fulfill one of their most
important goals, that of raising the status of the home.
By way of summation, we can examine two representative figures,
each of whom was writing about the home in the early twentieth
century: Mary Virginia Hawes Terhune, harking back to the nine-
teenth-century roots of home economics, and Christine Frederick,
foreshadowing the twentieth-century future. Terhune (1830-1922),
who wrote under the pen name of "Marion Harland," belonged to
the phenomenon of literary domesticity of the 18505 and yet pub-
lished well into the twentieth century because she lived to so vigor-
ous an old age. In many ways her career and her writings exemplify
the transitions about which we have been speaking. Indeed, in her
forties she herself made the transition from novelist to author of
cookbooks and giver of advice so that she was one of the women
who helped to create the discipline of home economics, although
not in an academic setting.
According to her own later account, the young Mary Virginia
Hawes had a childhood calculated to give her respect for the capaci-
ties of housewives. Born in Virginia to a Yankee father who had
moved south and a mother whose family had been part of the South
for generations, Terhune wrote in vivid detail about the domestic
aspects of the Old South in her autobiography. She remembered, for
example, that her mother had been one of the earliest subscribers
to Godey's: "Every number was read aloud in the family circle gath-
ered on cool evenings about my mother's work-stand."41 She re-
membered her careful supervision of every aspect of household main-
tenance: "The notable housewife knew to a fraction how much of
the raw products went to the composition of each dish she ordered.
So much flour was required for a loaf of rolls, and so much for a
dozen beaten biscuits. . . ,"42 Like Stowe's reminiscences of New
England kitchens, Terhune's autobiography occasionally partakes of
the quality of a genre painting:
We had fried chicken and waffles, hot rolls, ham, beaten bis-
cuits, honey, three kinds of preserves, and by special petition
of all the children, a mighty bowl of snow and cream, abun-
dantly sweetened, for supper. This dispatched, and at full
length, the journey having made us hungry, and the sight of
us having quickened the appetites of the rest, we sat about the
fire in the great 'chamber' on the first floor that was the throb-
bing heart of the home, and talked until ten o'clock.43
Not surprisingly, given these experiences, when she began to

write, first as a girl and then as a young woman, she produced work
that fit comfortably into the mold of the domestic novel. Her best-
known work of fiction, Alone, appeared in 1854 and eventually sold
some 100,000 copies. Although the heroine, Ida Ross, is thoroughly
conventional in her views about woman and her sphere, she is also
thoroughly competent: an orphan, she reinstitutes a benign domestic
order at the family plantation when she reaches maturity.
As we have seen, the domestic novel played itself out sometime
in the 18705, and at this juncture, Terhune, by now married to a
Presbyterian clergyman, switched to new types of writing; the do-
mestic advice treatise and the cookbook. If one examines her cook-
books one can see elements of both old and new. As early as 1878,
for example, she was giving recipes that employed canned tomatoes
and canned corn. Although she waxed lyrical about the beaten bis-
cuits of her girlhood, her recipes called for chemical leavening, both
soda and baking powder. On the other hand, the pound cake recipe
she gave in 1896 was the real thing, with eggs as the only leavening.
Moreover, that same cookbook has a recipe for a French chicken
casserole, incorporating wine, salmon, and cucumber salad, that does
not sound like something to gladden the heart of a rationalizing
home economist.*4
By the late nineteenth century, Marion Harland was the country's
favorite domestic authority. Her columns appeared in a number of
newspapers, and she received five hundred to a thousand letters per
week asking for advice. Her autobiography was serialized in the
Ladies Home Journal in 1920. Her literary output consisted of
twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories, twenty-five books
of domestic advice, and twelve miscellaneous books of travel, biog-
raphy, and history.45
The reason for going into detail about Terhune's life and em-
phasizing its rootedness in the nineteenth-century craft tradition is
that she lived long enough to sell her services to advertisers in the
twentieth century, thus becoming a one-woman bridge between the
cult of domesticity and the culture of consumption. An advertising
circular in the Warshaw Collection of Business Americana in the
Smithsonian Institution gives a ringing endorsement by "Marion
Harland" for the product in question.
If Terhune was a transitional figure who lived long enough to
endorse products, then Christine Frederick (1883-1970) was a
woman born at the right time to play a major role in the creation
of the advertising industry.48 Receiving a baccalaureate in science
from Northwestern University in 1906, she married, gave birth to
four children, and then began to study efficient procedures in the
home by setting up a model kitchen, the Applecroft Home Experi-
ment Station, at her own house in Greenlawn, Long Island. Soon
the fame of her experiments spread, and in 1912 she became house-
hold editor for the Ladies Home Journal. Wedded to the utility of
the scientific management model for home economics, she used her
position at the Journal to proselytize for this approach. In addition
to having all the right tools, housewives should learn to do every-
thing exactly on schedule, she thought. "And it is this great question
of the best way of dispatching housework and having it run on a
schedule, just as a train does, that I want to show in my next article.
I worked it out, I do it, and it works like a clock." Another cardinal
principle had to do with standardization: "Standardize some house-
hold task so that you can do it every day in an identical manner
•without much mental attention [emphasis added]. Does this not
make it seem less difficult?" She recommended that a housewife stick
to just one task at a time, until all the sweeping, for example, is com-
plete. She should work out a standard practice for each task, write
it down, and then stick to it. While "cooking too often depends on
the caprice of the family," laundry can be readily standardized.47
It should surprise no one to learn that evolutionary theory under-
lay her program: "The only reason that man is not still a savage is
his capacity to analyze, study, and plan. Women have, however,
relied far too much on custom and their emotions, with the result
that they have not lifted their sphere of labour out of the hard phys-
ical drudgery era, as man has lifted his office and shop, by scientific
management and invention."48 As with so many others, her analysis
required the intervention of outside experts like herself to improve
the housewife's lot. She was confident that the results would be
worthwhile: "by dignifying home economics as a science, and plac-
ing it on a level with other cultural studies, your daughter will learn
to recognize and accept the dignity of housework and homemaking
as she would never have learned it in your own home kitchen." This,
in turn, would provide "a fine antidote against the unnatural crav-
ings for 'careers.' "49
Like Lillian Gilbreth, Christine Frederick had a major influence
on kitchen design. Insofar as that influence led to intelligent place-
ment of drainboards, the construction of counters at the optimum
height, and similar innovations, it was beneficial to women. But
unlike the nineteenth-century progenitors, Catharine Beecher and
Harriet Beecher Stowe, who argued for centrally located and cheerful
kitchens, Frederick thought that small, unifunctional kitchens were

greatly to be preferred. A big, old-fashioned kitchen is just not effi-
cient, she thought.50 In this instance, it is clear that efficiency had
become a goal to be served for its own sake, irrespective of the emo-
tional life of the housewife and her family, rather than a means to
serve any larger purpose.
As with Terhune's cookbooks of the late nineteenth century, Fred-
erick's The New Housekeeping, written in 1913, contains elements
of old and new. More than once she mentions the power for good
that a housewife has at her disposal in her capacity as family pur-
chasing agent: "It is woman's privilege and duty as the possessor of
the powerful weapon of purchaser that it be used to prevent social
injustice."51 Yet working at cross purposes to this socially responsible
view of consumption was her opinion of the importance of brand
names and packaging. "Women are still fickle in their buying," she
thought. They would do better if they were to stick to brand names
with which they were familiar.52 In this passage she foreshadowed
the opinions she would express in her Selling Mrs. Consumer of
1929, where, instead of advising women how to buy intelligently
and responsibly, she advised advertisers how best to make their sales.
This book is a key document of the culture of consumption and will
be examined in more detail in the next chapter.
In the years between 1913 and 1929, Frederick moved from being
a pioneering home economist to being a pioneering advertising
woman. As her Applecroft Home Experiment Station became well
known, manufacturers began to send her their products to test. If
the product in question met with her approval, she would write
promotional literature on its behalf, evidently never worrying about
what this did to her credibility as an unbiased expert. Because in its
infancy the advertising industry discriminated against women, she
founded the League of Advertising Women in New York in 1912
and gave increasing time and attention to this pursuit.53 As with Ter-
hune, Frederick's metamorphosis is indicative of the ease with which
corporate America would be able to "buy" home economists as spokes-
women, thereby undermining the independence of the discipline.
This happened not because home economists were weak women,
THE HOUSEWIFE AND THE HOME ECONOMIST I /I
predisposed to sell out, but because the field had been misconceived
in the first place. Under the influence of the intellectual trends of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, such as the infatua-
tion with science and efficiency, the pioneer home economists ignored
most of .what had produced the esteem for domesticity in the early
nineteenth century and the concomitant esteem for the housewife,
and strove to make the home as much like a male workplace as pos-
sible. They thought that if this succeeded, it would not matter so
much if one sex was assigned the public world of work and the other
sex was consigned to the home. The idea that home can be a source
of redemptive values for other institutions was completely dis-
regarded.
Moreover, the field was misconceived because it is impossible to
"help" a housewife while systematically disparaging her life experi-
ences and judgment. Themselves women who were having to con-
tend with invidious stereotypes of female nature and female abilities
in the academy and the workplace, many of the pioneer home econ-
omists internalized the stereotypes and judged housewives accord-
ingly. All the professions of beneficent intent with respect to the
housewife—no doubt sincere—could not get around this difficulty.
Finally, when efficiency, expertise, and fidelity to the scientific
method become the highest values, the ability to resist a good offer
from an advertiser is greatly undermined. If the home is important
because it is outside the cash nexus, because it celebrates values in
opposition to marketplace values—the reason for its importance to
people like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Theodore Parker—then there
might be a reason to say no to General Foods or General Mills. In
parting company with this tradition, the home economists in essence
made ready to perform the role of Betty Crocker and the rest of her
sisterhood.54
SEVEN
Domesticity and the Culture

of Consumption
& /wN 1918 AND 1920 TWO NOVELS appeared that are representative
of the changes in the American home—and consequently in the role
of the housewife—that came to fruition in the 19205. Willa Gather's
My Antonia celebrated the sturdy farm wife whose multifarious
abilities could keep her family afloat. In her heroic portrayal of
Antonia Shimerda, Gather looked back to the nineteenth century.
On the other hand, in creating Carol Kennicott, the restless heroine
of Main Street, Sinclair Lewis gave the first significant depiction
in an American novel of what Betty Friedan would call "the problem
that has no name," that is, the pervasive emptiness of the middle-class
housewife's life. That the two novels appeared nearly back to back
is not surprising because a number of long-term trends suddenly
became visible and identifiable in the years following the First World
War. Indeed, the prewar home seems to resemble closely the Vic-
torian domicile of some remote ancestor, while the servantless home
of the 19205, filled with electrical appliances and brand-name prod-
ucts, is nearly as familiar as the home next door. And yet the distance
between those two homes was traversed with remarkable speed, so
that by 1930 the "home of consumption" was firmly entrenched in
American culture.
172
DOMESTICITY AND THE CULTURE OF CONSUMPTION 173
In effect, Willa Gather celebrated the female craft tradition just

as it was becoming obsolete, the coup de grace being rendered by
the commodification of the home after the war. Like Stowe before
her, Gather created a gallery of competent housewives in My Antonio.
and then used domesticity as a counterweight to the violence that
lurks both in human nature and in the environment. Unlike Stowe,
however, she did not employ domesticity as part of an analysis of
the larger realms of politics or religion. The ideology of domesticity
had become too attenuated by 1918 to sustain that weight.
My Antonia is narrated by Jim Burden, a man who has known
the title character since childhood. As children, Antonia and Jim
arrive simultaneously in the rural Nebraska of the late nineteenth
century, Jim to live with his grandparents and Antonia in company
with her Bohemian family. Because her mother is mean-spirited and
unskilled in housewifery, Antonia must learn about the domestic arts
from a series of other women. (In this theme Gather echoes not only
Stowe, but also Susan Warner in The Wide, Wide World.') As a
sensitive observer, Jim takes note of Antonia's apprenticeship, the
earliest portion of which is conducted by his own, highly skilled
grandmother. He recalls that as a young girl "Antonia loved to help
grandmother in the kitchen and to learn about cooking and house-
keeping."
Gather makes it clear that pioneering on the Great Plains was not
for the faint-hearted. People killed themselves out of homesickness;
families underwent cruel privation during the long winters. What
redeems the situation is the order created by skill—that of the farmer
in taming the natural world and more especially that of his wife in
maintaining the home. Recalling his first winter, Jim says:
The basement kitchen seemed heavenly safe and warm in those
days—like a tight little boat in a winter sea. The men were
out in the fields all day, husking corn, and when they came in
at noon, with long caps pulled down over their ears and their
feet in red-lined overshoes, I used to think they were like
Arctic explorers. In the afternoons, when grandmother sat up-
stairs darning or making husking gloves, I read "The Swiss
Family Robinson" aloud to her, and I felt that the Swiss family
had no advantages over us in the way of an adventurous life.

I was convinced that man's strongest antagonist is the cold. I
admired the cheerful zest with which grandmother went about
keeping us warm and comfortable and well-fed. She often
reminded me, when she was preparing for the return of the
hungry men, that this country was not like Virginia; and that
here a cook had, as she said, "very little to do with." On Sun-
days she gave us as much chicken as we could eat, and on
other days we had ham or bacon or sausage meat. She baked
either pies or cake for us every day, unless for a change, she
made my favourite pudding, striped with currants and boiled
in a bag.
Next to getting and keeping warm, dinner and supper were
the most interesting things we had to think about. Our lives
centered around warmth and food and the return of the men at
nightfall.1
Here we encounter many more characteristics of the domestic

novel during its first flowering: the kitchen as a bulwark against the
world, the iteration of types of food to suggest comfort, the vivid
and sympathetic description of interiors. Like Stowe recollecting her
Connecticut grandmother's home of the early nineteenth century and
using these interiors in Old Town Folks and others of the New
England novels, Gather based the domestic scenes in My Antonia
on her own childhood. She, like Jim Burden, had moved from Vir-
ginia to Nebraska in her tenth year (1883), and she, too, had wit-
nessed the struggle of immigrant families to make homes in a new
land. She understood the tension between the desire to cling to the
old ways and the desire to assimilate, with food as an important re-
source in resisting the loss of cultural identity. Hence it was natural
for her to focus on domesticity and, in particular, on the preparation
of food.
As an instance in point, the adult Jim Burden returns to Nebraska
after an absence of twenty years and goes to see Antonia, the mother
of a large brood of offspring. The children are eager to introduce
the visitor to the wonders of the fruit cave where their mother stores
her preserved food:
Anna and Yelka showed me three small barrels; one full of dill
pickles, one full of chopped pickles, and one full of pickled
watermelon rinds.
"You wouldn't believe, Jim, what it takes to feed them all!"
their mother exclaimed. "You ought to see the bread we bake
on Wednesdays and Saturdays! It's no wonder their poor papa
can't get rich, he has to buy so much sugar for us to preserve
with. We have our own wheat ground for flour—but then
there's that much less to sell."
Nina and Jan and a little girl named Lucie, kept shyly point-
ing out to me the shelves of glass jars. They said nothing, but,
glancing at me, traced on the glass with their finger tips the
outlines of the cherries and strawberries and crabapples within,
trying by a blissful expression of countenance to give me some
idea of their deliciousness. "Show him the spiced plums,
mother. Americans don't have those," said one of the older
boys. "Mother uses them to make kolaches," he added.2
Domesticity plays an altogether different role in Main Street.

Twelve years younger than Gather, Sinclair Lewis had experienced
a less heroic stage of the development of the Upper Midwest than
had she. As a mature writer, he remembered the narrowness of small-
town life in his native Sauk Centre, Minnesota, rather than the
warmth and coziness of the homes, and the narrowness was what
he emphasized in creating his fictional Gopher Prairie. Moreover,
for his heroine there is no apprenticeship in housewifery because her
work is seen as virtually meaningless and the older women as vicious
gossips rather than as keepers of a tradition.
Main Street begins, as does My Antonia, with a character moving
into a small rural town. Giving up her career as a librarian, Carol
Milford marries Dr. Will Kennicott and moves from St. Paul to
Gopher Prairie. Filled with a desire to improve and uplift small-town
life in the abstract, she is dismayed by her first sight of the actual
village of 3,000 people. Moreover, their home is far from welcom-
ing. Lewis describes the interior as dingy, airless, and lugubrious.
Even the furniture—family relics assembled by Will's mother—seems
hostile:
Ij6 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
"How could people ever live with things like this?" she shud-
dered. She saw the furniture as a circle of elderly judges, con-
demning her to death by smothering. The tottering brocade
chair squealed, "Choke her—choke her—smother her." The old
linen smelled of the tomb. She was alone in this house, this
strange still house, among the shadows of dead thoughts and
haunting repressions. "I hate it!" she panted. "Why did I
ever—."3
Before very much time has elapsed, Carol has to confront the fact
that the dullness and provincialism of Gopher Prairie combined with
her circumscribed role as a doctor's wife make her life so boring as
to be nearly unendurable. She has fixed up their home to her satis-
faction and thereby exhausted the gratifications of housework.
Routine care was all she could devote to the house. Only by
such fussing as the Widow Bogart's could she make it fill her
time.
She could not have outside employment. To the village doc-
tor's wife it was taboo.
She was a woman with a working brain and no work.*
Trapped in a sterile domesticity, under the constant, prying surveil-

lance of older women, Carol stages a brief rebellion by going off to
Washington, D.C., to work but comes back to Dr. Will and Gopher
Prairie after two years. Her only hope is that her daughter's genera-
tion will have more success in changing the world than she has had—
she knows herself to be defeated.
In many ways Main Street seems to be a working-out in fiction
of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's ideas about home and the role of
women. In the first place, Carol's reaction to her mother-in-law's
furniture echoes the reaction of the narrator to the yellow wallpaper
in the story of the same name: a domestic interior symbolizes the
vacuousness of the housewife's life. Further, Lewis evidently shares
Gilman's low opinion of the usual expertise brought to bear on
housewifery. At one point Carol wonders "how many millions of
women had lied to themselves during the death-rimmed years
through which they pretended to enjoy the puerile methods persist-
ing in housework." Like Gilman, Lewis combines a proto-feminist

critique of woman's oppression with considerable contempt for
women themselves.5
There is, however, one sympathetic female character in Main
Street besides Carol, and she is married to the most sympathetic
male character. The Kennicotts have a Swedish maid, Bea Soren-
son, who is cheerful, hard-working, and unpretentious. She leaves
them to marry Miles Bjornstam, a handyman known as the Red
Swede both because of his coloring and because of his unorthodox
opinions. As devoted as his wife to the maintenance of a cheerful
home, Miles buys Bea a phonograph: "While she was busy with
the activities her work-hungry muscles found—washing, ironing,
mending, baking, dusting, preserving, plucking a chicken, painting
the sink; tasks which, because she was Miles's full partner, were
exciting and creative—Bea listened to the phonograph records with
rapture. . . ."8 In this passage, Lewis seems to indicate that domes-
ticity would not be so obnoxious were it coupled with sexual sym-
metry. On this point he departed from Gilman—for whom domes
ticity had no redeeming features whatsoever.
Looking back from the perspective of the 19805, it is clear that
Carol Kennicott has been close to being the representative middle-
class American woman of the twentieth century, while Antonia
Shimerda is the archetype of a tradition that has had an ever-decreas-
ing salience for most Americans.7 That 1920 was the year in which
for the first time people living in towns and cities predominated in
the census over people living in the country had much to do with
this phenomenon. In fact, the heroic farm wife was on her way to
virtual extinction as a cultural ideal by 1920 as her real-life counter-
parts diminished so substantially in number. And the industrialized
home, foreshadowed in the late nineteenth century, would become
a well-established reality during the ensuing decade.
Sinclair Lewis was far from the only American of his day to real-
ize that the society was undergoing a sea change and that this change
would have a profound impact on women. One of the masterpieces
of American cultural analysis, Middletown, by Robert and Helen
Lynd, was predicated on a similar awareness. The Lynds went to
Muncie, Indiana, in the mid-twenties, determined to uncover how

the community was different from what it had been in 1890. They
and a team of assistants spent a year and a half in Muncie, observing,
interviewing, and surveying its inhabitants. The general outlines of
what they found can be summarized as follows. The Muncie of 1925
had been penetrated by a variety of consumer goods, the automobile
being the most important, and this had dramatically altered the way
people spent their leisure time and the way they allocated their
resources. Particularly noteworthy were the changes in homes and
in household routines. Less than 5 percent of Muncie's homes had
been wired for electricity in 1890, whereas in June 1925, 99 percent
were wired. A small fraction of the homes had had running water
in 1890, yet by 1925 approximately three-quarters possessed running
water. The number of families with servants had declined by about
50 percent. The Lynds accounted for this phenomenon as follows:
"Smaller houses, easier to 'keep up' labor-saving devices, canned
goods, baker's bread, less heavy meals, and ready made clothing are
among the places where the lack of servants is being compensated
for and time saved today."8
That the patterns uncovered by the Lynds in Muncie were na-
tional as well as local has been confirmed by subsequent students
of housework and domestic technology. Ruth Schwartz Cowan uses
the word "revolutionize" in conjunction with the changes of the
19205:
Almost every aspect of household labor was revolutionized in

the 2o's; in good part this was due to electrification. In 1907
(the first year for which data are available) only 8% of dwell-
ings in the U.S. had electric service; by the time we entered
the war this had risen to 24.3% and by 1925 more than half
the homes in America (53-2%) had been wired. If we consider
the data for urban and rural non-farm dwellings the figures are
even more striking: almost half of those homes had been elec-
trified by 1920 (47.4%) and more than two-thirds by 1925
(69.4%). . . .
A study of 100 Ford employees living in Detroit in 1929
revealed that 98 families had an electric iron, 80 had electric
sewing machines, 49 had electric washing machines, and 21

had electric vacuum cleaners. The benefits of technology were
clearly not limited to the upper middle classes.9
Because the home was subject to so much technological innova-

tion, many households could and did dispense with servants—again
demonstrating that "Middletown" was typical of national patterns.
The decade of the 19205 saw fundamental change in the nature of
domestic service. First, except in the South where there was a supply
of black women consigned to being domestics, the number of house-
holds with servants declined dramatically. Second, where servants
persisted, they were much more likely to be day-workers rather than
living-in, which had been the case in earlier periods.10
Yet another change of the 19205 was the introduction of frozen
food. Clarence Birdseye, the pioneer of the frozen-food industry, re-
ceived a patent in 1925 for the new technique, and by 1934 some
39 million pounds of frozen food were being processed annually.11
When coupled with the burgeoning growth of the canning industry,
this all added up to immense changes in cookery and in the Ameri-
can diet. Needless to say, there was also an impact on the way that
the average housewife allocated her time.
"Birdseye" joined other brand names in processed foods and house-
hold products that were well established by the 19205 such as
Nabisco (1898), Del Monte (1916), Crisco, Fels-Naptha, and
Hoover. The emergence of a national market in the late nineteenth
century and developments in packaging in the early twentieth cen-
tury created an altogether different style of marketing and facilitated
the work of the advertising industry in heightening consumer de-
mand. Some brand names such as Jell-O, Kleenex, and Frigidaire
became so well known as to enter the vocabulary. A related develop-
ment was the introduction of the self-service grocery by the Piggly
Wiggly chain in 1916, a change that would result in the decline
of the "Mom and Pop" grocery store.
It is well known that the advertising industry came of age in the
19205. Not only did the volume of advertising rise during the period
but also copywriters pioneered new styles of layouts, used photogra-
I So JUST A HOUSEWIFE
phy more extensively, and developed non-rational styles of appeal

to the consumer. "I want advertising copy to arouse me," the asso-
ciate editor of Advertising and Selling had written in 1919, "to create
in me a desire to possess the thing that's advertised, even though I
don't need it."12 During the next ten years, the industry became
increasingly sophisticated about achieving this goal.
Finally, another indication that new household patterns had taken
shape and a new attitude toward consumer goods had come into
being in the 19205 concerns installment buying. More and more
people were able to buy more and more appliances (as well as auto-
mobiles) because of the frequency with which they could employ
this means of paying for a purchase. According to the Lynds:
Today Middletown lives by a credit economy that is available

in some form to nearly every family in the community. The
rise and spread of the dollar-down-and-so-much-per plan ex-
tends credit for virtually everything—homes, $200 overstuffed
living-room suites, electric washing machines, automobiles, fur
coats, diamond rings—to persons of whom frequently little is
known as to their intention or ability to pay.13
Another contemporary scholar, the economist E. R. A. Seligman,

wrote a book about installment buying in 1927, predicated on the
insight that this method of obtaining credit was creating an economic
revolution. He estimated that in 1926 installment sales accounted
for $4.5 billion of a total national retail sales of $38 billion (which
included food and clothing as well as consumer durables).1*
All of these changes—brand names, installment buying, the heyday
of American advertising—crystallized to produce what has been called
the culture of consumption.15 As Warren Susman argued in a recent
essay, the culture of republicanism of the nineteenth century was
based on limits, restraint, and sacrifice, with "character" as the essen-
tial mode of self-presentation. This culture gave way to one based
on abundance, fulfillment, gratification, and consumption, with "per-
sonality" replacing character in importance.16 The constellation of
hedonistic attitudes that emerged in the 19205, "the Jazz Age," sym-
ISI
bolized the birth of a new era, an era that could not fail to have
enormous consequences for the status of domesticity.
Let us look at the four significant functions that the home had
gained by 1830 and assess their status one hundred years later in the
light of these developments. As we have seen, the political function
of the home had been eroded by changes in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, chiefly the emergence of an evolutionary perspective that saw
the home as irrelevant to human progress. The capacity for the home
to serve as an arena for the display of female prowess had been greatly
undermined by a combination of technological innovation and the
arrogation to themselves of domestic expertise by the home economics
profession. The religious function was unlikely to be especially salient
in an increasingly secular society. The Lynds, for example, inferred
the existence of "doubts and uneasiness" about Christian belief in
Muncie in 1925 and noted that Sunday was well on its way to be-
coming a day for recreation rather than for the solemn observation
of the Sabbath.
What was left, then, of the original foundation of the ideology
of domesticity was the heightened emotional role home had gained
by 1830. If anything, that role had become even more important by
the early twentieth century. Yet the importance was tied to a new
self-consciousness—not to say anxiety—about how well the women
in charge of the home could meet their families' emotional needs.
Moreover, home-centered values had so much competition from other
sources of cultural value by the 19205 that housewives in effect had
as much responsibility for the emotional well-being of the society as
ever, along with a diminished capacity to meet that responsibility.
In an astute analysis of the development of youth culture in the
twenties, Paula Pass argues that the trends in the Anglo-American
family of the late eighteenth century—democratization, companion-
ate norms, child-centeredness—had become even more full-blown by
the early twentieth century. Freedom and affection were seen as the
basis for child nurture, and a regiment of psychologists and other
social scientists set out to explain to women how this ideal could best
be achieved. Recognizing that the home was no longer a center of
production, experts argued that it was uniquely suited to foster emo-

tional health in an industrial society:
Family sociologists thus greeted the affectionate family enthu-

siastically because it provided a rich medium for personal satis-
factions. But while they wrote endlessly about individual
needs, they worried constantly about social order. The experts
were, in fact, proposing that the emotional family would do
more than satisfy the individual. They believed that it would
ensure the health of the society. The key was the concept of
psychological adjustment. . . .17
The housewife thus became the party in charge of psychological

adjustment and this in a Freudian age given to the frequent employ-
ment of such terms as "psychosis" and "neurosis." Given these trends,
the women's magazines were quick to print advice by experts so that
women could be kept up-to-date in their approach to child-rearing
and home-making. For example, the Woman's Home Companion
of January 1922 contained an article entitled "Are You a 100%
Mother?" The author explained how women could rate themselves
in a number of areas.
At least one contemporary observer remarked on the difficulties
presented to women by the new psychology. In an article in the
June 1927 issue of the Ladies Home Journal, Virginia Terhune Van
de Water (Marion Harland's daughter) argued that mothers were
no longer immune from criticism in the wake of the Freudian revolu-
tion: '"Mother, Home, and Heaven!' used to form the pious three.
Now the Home is more of an exception than a rule; Mother is cast
down from her pinnacle; and a good many people are trying to take
away Heaven." She noted that the new prescriptions for women
contained contradictory elements. Mother was supposed to let go
as her children grew up, to refrain from invoking any maternal
authority over them, and yet to "Be There" should they need her.
At the same time, the experts were far from unanimous in their
agreement about the best way to raise children. Against the chorus
of praise for love and democracy as the basis for child nurture, John
B. Watson, the noted behaviorist, raised his voice with contrary
advice. Distrusting affection and adjustment as the basis of the social

order, Watson placed his reliance on training and habit. No less than
those who emphasized affection, Watson urged the mother to take
seriously the consequences of her mistakes: "But once a child's char-
acter has been spoiled by bad handling, which can be done in a few
days, who can say that the damage is ever repaired?"18 Committed
to the ideal of "scientific" child care as well as to his extreme environ-
mentalism, he doubted that the home was the right environment to
socialize children but realized that it was likely to continue as the
locus of child-rearing for the foreseeable future. "It is a serious ques-
tion in my mind whether there should be individual homes for chil-
dren—or even whether children should know their parents. There
are undoubtedly much more scientific ways of bringing up children,
which will probably mean finer and happier children."18 The mother
who wanted to do a good job of child-rearing—to approximate labora-
tory conditions for child care—should stifle her emotions, sternly re-
sist "spoiling" the child, and adhere to rigid schedules, in Watson's
view. While his ideas never captured the majority, at least in their
most doctrinaire form, they were widely disseminated in American
society, and hence had an impact impossible to dismiss.20
The picture that emerges of the 19205 is thus one of ever-increas-
ing self-consciousness about the home's expressive function, whether
defined in positive or negative terms. Simultaneously, however, the
home was losing ground to such attractions as the automobile and
the movies in its ability to command allegiance, especially the alle-
giance of young people. In Muncie as early as 1925, the Lynds found
that the automobile had fundamentally altered courtship patterns:
even high-schoolers could and did remove themselves from the super-
vision of their parents or other adults while on a date. The Lynds
found, further, that in the peak movie-going month of December
1923, four and a half times the total population of Muncie went to
the movies. The content of the films they saw was in decided contrast
to values fostered by the ideology of domesticity: "Alimony—brilliant
men, beautiful jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels, petting
parties in the purple dawn, all ending in one terrific smashing climax
that makes you gasp."21
That traditional domestic values were losing ground is particularly

well illustrated by an article in the Ladies Home Journal by F. Scott
Fitzgerald. The fact that the prophet of the Jazz Age was welcome
in the pages of so staid a publication is remarkable in itself. Even
more remarkable is the tenor of the article, entitled "Imagination and
a Few Mothers." Fitzgerald begins by proclaiming, "The average
home is a horribly dull place. This is a platitude; it's so far taken for
granted that it's the basis of our national humor." The husband wants
his club, and the wife wants to go to the movies. This is because
the home fails in imagination. Indeed, there has been an "age-old
fight against domestic dullness." Despite this dilemma, however,
Fitzgerald holds out the hope that an imaginative mother, one who
resolutely purges herself of dullness, can compete with other attrac-
tions. He himself knows a Mrs. Paxton whose home was "a success
because she had a good time in it herself." What is more she has
never hesitated to tell her children when they are boring.22 The home
is thus being evaluated solely on its ability to keep its occupants
entertained and without regard to its moral or social capacities. It
would be hard to imagine a greater departure than this from the
discussions of the virtuous household conducted during the ante-
bellum period.
In effect, Fitzgerald was telling housewives to join in the spirit
of Jazz Age hedonism and in the priorities it fostered. Another source
of competition for domesticity in the twenties was the widely revered
world of business, and housewives were being urged to emulate this,
too, rather than cling to an alternate and, implicitly, outmoded set
of values. As we have seen, there were many givers of domestic
advice in the early twentieth century who thought that scientific
management and efficiency were appropriate goals for the housewife.
By the teens and twenties, articles urging this approach were regu-
larly appearing in women's magazines. "Are business methods pos-
sible in the home?" queried an article of the same name in the
Journal of May 1919. The answer was yes: young wives who went
from the office to the home would be better equipped than their
sisters who lacked business experience.
What all this meant was that the home—still defined as a haven
by most social scientists and most other Americans—lacked the criti-

cal, independent edge it had possessed in the antebellum years. Vir-
ginia Terhune Van de Water had noted that the mothers of the
19205 were supposed to Be There for other people on whom the
mothers could make no claims of their own. Similarly, the emotion-
ally intense home of the 19205, whose ability to produce psychological
adjustment in its inhabitants was an article of faith for most Ameri-
cans, no longer represented values that could make serious demands
on those inhabitants. Where Sarah Josepha Hale, writing in Godey's,
had addressed middle-class housewives with unassailable certainty
about the moral superiority of home to any other institution, the
editors of the Ladies Home Journal seventy years later revealed no
such certainty. The housewife might need to be frivolous on occa-
sion so as not to bore her family and businesslike at other times so
as to make the optimum use of her time and resources. None of this
was calculated to give the women in charge of the home any lever-
age in asserting their claims vis-a-vis husbands or children. About all
housewives could attempt was to be loving, and hope for the best.
Everyone told them that unhappiness stemmed from a mother's mis-
takes. But no one explained the practical steps whereby a mother
could insure that her family would heed her direction—as influenced
by the many experts.
At worst, domesticity might be seen as not merely irrelevant but
as a positive impediment to other, more meaningful goals. The most
forceful statement of this position appears in Arrcnvsmith, another
of Sinclair Lewis's novels of the 19205 and one that was instrumental
in his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in i93o.23
Martin Arrowsmith is a young medical scientist who has to combat
a variety of enemies, including his second wife, before he is finally
able to do his research unimpeded. Lewis gives him a mentor, Dr.
Max Gottlieb, who exemplifies all the values of neutral, unemo-
tional, supposedly value-free science. Martin's most helpful ally is
his first wife Leora, who comes as close to being ego-free as a char-
acter can be. She makes no demands on "Sandy," as she calls her
husband, and has no life or interests of her own. She is not even
especially competent at being a housewife. She is happy to sit home,
wait for her husband, whose hours are extraordinarily irregular, and
listen to him whenever he needs her. Her only fault lies in contract-
ing a tropical disease, dying, and leaving her husband alone—or rather
leaving him to a much more assertive second wife.
Joyce is everything that Leora was not. She expects Martin to
attend dinner parties, she wants him to take an interest in their child,
and she insists that he shape his life to suit her needs as well as
his own. At one point, he groans, "Oh Lord, there's The Arranger-
wants me to come to tea with some high-minded hen." Finally, he
realizes that he will have to forsake his wife and child if he is to
serve science to the fullest extent possible. He moves to the Vermont
woods, where he and another researcher share facilities and devote
themselves to their work. Terry, the other scientist, proposes to
Martin that they bring in a few more researchers, lest in their
isolation the two of them should quarrel: "[T]he laboratory scheme
should be extended to include eight (but never more!) maverick and
undomestic researchers like themselves. . . ." Under this regimen,
Martin begins to hit his scientific stride: "[H]e became stronger and
surer and no doubt less human."24 Lewis makes it clear that becom-
ing less human is not too high a price to pay for the achievement
that lies within Martin's grasp. In effect, Lewis makes a virtue of
what people later in the century have called "workaholism" and in
so doing heaps disapproval on the wife who tries to assert the claims
of home.
Whether the competition for domesticity stemmed from the male-
oriented values centered in business and science or from the youth-
oriented hedonism associated with the Jazz Age, the home had been
sufficiently devalued so as to lose some of its ability to be an emo-
tional haven. Yet at the same time it was losing so many of its nine-
teenth-century functions, it was gaining a new one appropriate to
the new culture of consumption that, as we have seen, came of age
in the 19205: it was the place where sufficient consumer demand
must be generated to keep the economy afloat. And the supreme
social duty of the housewife—mostly unstated, but no less real-
became that of spending freely.
As awareness of gender-related issues has grown, a few economists
have begun to analyze the twentieth-century housewife's role in the

economy. Says one student of the subject: "Because housework does
not create surplus value [in the technical sense] there has been no
incentive for capitalism to encourage a reorganization of the work
in order to increase productivity—that is, minimize labor time." In
fact, capital's interests may be best served by the waste and ineffi-
ciency of the housewife's time and of material goods both.25 Says
another economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, "The conversion of
women into a crypto-servant class was an economic accomplishment
of the first importance."26 This is because industrial capitalism re-
quires a high level of consumer spending—optimally of a rather
indiscriminate nature—and this task has been ascribed to women.
Their "work" does not show up in calculations of the gross national
product; hence until recently it has been largely ignored.
It is in this context that Christine Frederick's Selling Mrs. Con-
sumer belongs. Rather than being aimed at women, as had been the
case with her earlier books, Mrs. Consumer was aimed at the adver-
tising industry and attempted to set forth the best means for inducing
housewives to spend as much as possible. Frederick begins by de-
scribing Mrs. Average Consumer in no very flattering terms: with
little education and a limited vocabulary, she is more illogical than
a man. Moreover, "the present generation of women are not bound
much by religious controls. . . ."2T Implicitly, of course, all of this
makes Mrs. Consumer the more manipulable.
Because it would be advantageous for the manufacturers with
goods to sell were each household to consume as much as possible,
Frederick coined the term "creative waste" to describe the goal to-
ward which the advertising industry should urge women. What is
creative waste? It is "looking to a large end, beyond the draining of
the last bit of utility,"28 the larger end presumably being the main-
tenance of prosperity. Why should women bother to make bread-
pudding out of leftover crusts, for example? An accelerating rate of
obsolescence for products was all to the good, Frederick thought.
All that was to be desired was that Mrs. Consumer "would waste
more rather than less!"
She had similar ideas with respect to household appliances: 'There
should be vastly more household equipment sold." Toward this end,

manufacturers had to take on the job of educating women: "The
manufacturer must educate, train, and transfer a worker from a hand
and craft technique, over into a tool technique."29 Here we find
an overt assault on what was left of the craft tradition. An earlier
generation of advice-givers from Charlotte Perkins Gilman to the
pioneer home economists had downgraded the value of women's own
expertise in the name of science. Now, those who attacked female
expertise more likely did so with a very concrete goal in mind—that
of selling a product.
Another book from the 19205 that was aimed at the advertising
industry was Advertising to Women by Carl Naether. The author
stated that women were believed to buy 80 to 90 percent of the
commodities in general use. Therefore, advertising copy should be
written squarely with women in mind and employ "woman's own
language." For example, in describing apparel, Naether suggested
the use of the phrase "such sweet shades."30 The point is that those
who were writing advice for copywriters displayed little respect for
the intelligence of the women who would be responding to the
advertisements.
While Frederick and Naether were advising copywriters about
how best to sell products to women, there was a whole discipline that
stood ready to make itself available to corporate America for a sim-
ilar purpose, and that was the home economics profession. In the
pages of the women's magazines, both in articles and in advertise-
ments, there was mounted a concerted effort, made credible to women
by the endorsement of experts, to break down the resistance to new
products.31 Moreover, hundreds and eventually thousands of home
economists found employment directly with large business firms such
as General Mills and General Electric, where their expertise was used
toward the goal of heightening the levels of consumption of par-
ticular products.32
A sample of articles from the Ladies Home Journal will demon-
strate the tenor of the advice that was being given to women as the
culture of consumption took firm hold. In February 1922 an article
titled "What Science Has Done for the Housewife" urged women
to use the new food substitutes wherever possible. Science had done
"wonderful things" for women, Mary D. Warren contended, yet
there were still housewives who clung to tradition and to the dead
past, "who pass by the scientific food substitutes excellent as they are,
for high-priced and scarce products." Why not use powdered milk,
canned milk, and oleo margarine? Warren queried. At more or less
the same time, an advertisement for Crisco read, "Why Make Such
Expensive Cakes?" The housewife could substitute Crisco for butter
and add a little salt. "It [Crisco] is always pure, fresh, colorless, taste-
less, and odorless."33
The new electrical appliances also received endorsement: "My
Favorite Coworker—Electricity" contained Clara Zillesen's enthusi-
astic praise of these products in the February 1927 issue. She enu-
merated as many types of small and large appliances as she could
envision, including, in addition to the range, the dishwasher, and the
washing wachine, such items as the electric "fan, electric sewing
machine, electric heater, electric clock, electric milk-bottle warmer,
electric heating pad, and electric hair curler. "There's something so
cuddly and comforting about an electric heating pad which helps any
ache or ill where the hot-water bottle is so impersonal. . . ."
An ambitious series of articles by Gove Hambidge late in the
decade proclaimed a new era in foods and housework. The food
industry had received the benefit of "creative genius," Hambidge
thought. "Poets and dreamers" had evolved new products and new
ways of packaging so that in 1928, 90 percent of the grocery business
was in packaged goods: "I talked with a man in the display room
of a modern wholesale grocery—a grocery fanatic, always dreaming
new packages, new ways of doing this, that and the other. For thirty
years his senses have been passionately alert for every reaction of
the consumer to the products of his firm." It was this kind of dedi-
cation that had produced such striking results. " 'Do you think we
could depend on taste alone in making our tomato soup?'" one man
said. Only chemists could produce a truly uniform flavor for each
can. " 'Can any home cook tie that one? And how many households
would take the trouble to make a vegetable soup, as this company
does, using over a dozen different vegetables?'" With respect to baked
ipo JUST A HOUSEWIFE
goods, too, Hambidge extolled the wonders of science: "The modern

bakery selling and advertising its products all over the country is a
tiled, window-lined sunlit sanitarium. Ingredients for bread go in
at one end, and wrapped, sealed loaves, perfectly baked, come out
at the other without a finger having touched them. Small wonder
the woman who bakes bread in her own kitchen is almost as extinct
as the ichthyosaurus." As for housework, ". . . we are so obsessed
with the scientific viewpoint that we are applying it to every aspect
of life," and the result was such a proliferation of objects that the
home was truly being mechanized, Hambidge thought. There had
been those who had expressed doubts as to whether this goal might
be achievable. The pessimists were overlooking the fact that vacuum-
ing a rug is "fun."34
Finally, in 192,9 Lita Bane, past president of the American Home
Economics Association, became an associate editor of the Journal.
In a January 1930 article titled "Homemaking and the Scientific
Spirit," she urged women not to cling with irrational fervor to "the
good old days" and "the good old ways." The Journal wanted to
become a clearing-house for the dissemination of new information.
In a subsequent article Bane attributed women's dislike for house-
work to their resistance to new ideas. "Drudgery is compulsory work
that we do not know how to do well!" Yet cooking alone was re-
ceiving added interest from scientific discoveries, standardized recipes,
and new packaging, to say nothing of other areas of housework.35
The nineteenth century had seen the development of a cultural
ideal of "notable" housewifery whose main properties were skill and
frugality. The 19205 version of the good housewife as set forth by
the women's magazines had a much more passive quality. Frugality
was pass6, and skill involved listening to the right experts. Again to
emphasize the rapidity of the cultural transformation, the Journal
had run an article as late as August 1920, "Your Economy Question-
naire," with literally dozens of suggestions for being frugal such as
saving and clarifying fat, saving paraffin from year to year, using
buttermilk as far as possible in cooking, doing the mending every
week, and saving and selling old rags. The woman who had done
all this would not have been able to pass muster with Scott Fitz-
gerald's Mrs. Paxton, who never bored her family, let alone with all
the experts later in the decade who urged women not to cling to the
dead past. She would, however, have been exercising her judgment
by conserving rather than wasting all her materials, a housewifely
feat that operated at cross-purposes to maintaining maximum levels
of consumption.
What, then, was the significance for women of these rapid
changes? In the first place, one can discern a schizoid quality in
the advice to women about their proper sphere as reflected in the
pages of the Ladies Home Journal in the early twenties. An article
in the May 1919 issue by Emily Blair stated the issue succinctly:
"What Are Women Going To Do?" The author argued that Amer-
ican women had learned during the war that they had a margin
of spare time that they could employ for war work. With the war
over, how would that time be spent? Should women go back to
bridge, do useless things, fold their hands? Blair thought that the
answer lay in club work, especially work with activist clubs like the
National Consumers League. The woman not gainfully employed
would then be offering her leisure as her family's contribution to
the public good. This, of course, was an updated version of domestic
feminism, but it would founder as new priorities involving less so-
cially oriented uses for leisure time asserted their claims in the en-
suing decade.
Women should be publicly active, but only up to a point, and the
Journal tried to set limits in a "credo for the new woman" in August
1920 (simultaneous with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amend-
ment giving women the vote):
I believe in woman's rights; but I believe in woman's sacrifices

also.
I believe in woman's freedom; but I believe it should be within
the restrictions of the Ten Commandments.
I believe in woman's suffrage; but I believe many other things
are vastly more important.
I believe in woman's brains; but I believe still more in her
emotions.
Ip2 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
There is an uneasy sense being conveyed in this article that the old
verities are inadequate for the new age—no doubt the later decision
to publish Fitzgerald's piece stemmed from this sense—coupled with
reluctance to part entirely with traditional notions of woman's
sphere.38
While advice-givers debated as to the best use for woman's time
and the appropriate content of woman's sphere, women themselves
were reallocating their time in response to the new consumer goods,
with a further net loss both of craft and of human contact. As has
already been suggested in Chapter 4, the decade of the twenties was
the period when the housewife's job began to metamorphose into a
post-industrial one. Although production of basic commodities like
textiles and soap had left the home early in the nineteenth century
(except in frontier areas), women continued to be producers of cloth-
ing, skilled cookery and baking, and needlework for another hundred
years. But the culture of consumption militated against their being
producers of anything of substance. There were at least two reasons
for this. In the first place, brand-name processed foods were widely
available. In the second place, the tone of advice in the women's
magazines suggested that it would be almost atavistic to make one's
own soup, say, when canned soup was so much more scientifically
correct than the homemade variety. At the same time, the diffusion
of the automobile, the declining number of servants, and the new
types of merchandising put middle-class housewives squarely into
the service mode, whether chauffeuring children, running errands,
or shopping in a self-service market. Increasingly, after the twenties,
they would move from isolation in their homes via isolation in their
cars to the relatively impersonal supermarket, with its hygienically
packaged goods.37
Most significant for women, perhaps, was the fact that the home
of consumption conferred no special claims to cultural influence on
housewives. Because home was no longer a moral beacon, the woman
in charge of the home had little rationale for speaking out publicly
in its name. Those who did so were likely to be dismissed as silly
or sentimental. At least one scholar, Paula Baker, dealing with the
female political culture and seeking to explain women's failure to
form a separate voting bloc after 1920, singles out the devaluation
of domesticity as an important part of the story. By the 19205,
"Women [had] thus abandoned the home as a basis for a separate
political culture. . . . Their rejection of the woman's sphere as an
organizing principle discouraged women from acting as a separate
political bloc."38 It is, of course, the argument of this study that
women did not so much abandon the home as a basis for their
culture as have it so badly undermined as to be worthless for justify-
ing female political claims. Nonetheless, it is striking that one who
was studying female activism and not necessarily focusing on the
home came to this conclusion.
Yet another consequence of the culture of consumption concerned
the status of older women. The attack on traditional female expertise
and the authority of older women already mounted by home econo-
mists proved to be congruent with the purposes of the advertising
industry in promoting the sale of new products. For example, an
advertisement for Cannon sheets proclaimed: "I taught Aunt Sue a
lesson—She'd been living in the past!" The copy continued: "Bob
and I both are crazy about Aunt Sue. We try to do things right
when she visits. But when she saw the luxurious sheets on her bed,
she thought that we were living beyond our means. That's because
she didn't know about Cannon's sensibly priced percale . . ." The
point is that the culture of consumption enhanced the essential irrel-
evancy of older women to the rest of society. The message conveyed
by the advertising industry was that older women should be brushed
off, politely and kindly of course, should they have the temerity to
give advice.39
IF ONE COULD accurately pinpoint the exact time when the phrase
"Just a housewife," made its first appearance, it seems likely that
the period under discussion might have been that time. Certainly
the likelihood that domesticity could be a fully adequate prop for
female self-esteem had greatly diminished by 1930. The consumer
culture along with the hedonism it spawned sounded the death knell
both for housewifery as a skilled craft and for mother as a moral

arbiter. And yet the overwhelming majority of American women
were still housewives for the better part of their lives.
We might well ask why, if the commodification of the home had
so deleterious an impact on women, they consented to it. Are con-
sumers sheep, to be manipulated by any corporation that has enough
money to spend on an advertising campaign? Although there is no
easy answer to this question, it seems worth pointing out that women
resisted the process for quite some time. For instance, most house-
wives refrained from using bakers' bread until after 1900, preferring
to make their own bread despite the work involved.40 When pro-
cessed food and brand-name products began to carry the day, they
did so not only in response to the promptings of copywriters but
undergirded also by the advice of home economists and ultimately
by the enormous authority of modern science.41
By whatever means—and scholars have only begun to analyze ade-
quately the genesis and diffusion of the culture of consumption—the
commodification of the home took place. One indication that women
were far from being beneficiaries of this development was the ap-
pearance in 1920 of a book entitled The Nervous Housewife by
Dr. Abraham Myerson (whose work also appeared in magazines).
Although Dr. Myerson had a certain propensity for blaming the
victim, he also possessed sympathetic insight into the nature of the
housewife's problems. Perhaps most striking was his contention,
based on his clinical experience, that housewifely nervousness was
virtually universal: "Most housewives are nervous, both in their own
eyes and in those of their husbands, yet rightly they are not regarded
as sick. They are uncomfortable, even unhappy, and the way out
seems impossible to find."42
Myerson thought that at least part of the difficulty lay in the
nature of housework in an industrial society. Although it is menial
work like ditch-digging, housework nonetheless carries an enormous
emotional baggage, and hence is glorified in unrealistic ways: "In
its aims and purposes housekeeping is the highest of professions; in
its methods and techniques it ranks among the lowest of occupa-
tions."43 At least no one tries to convince ditch diggers or garbage
collectors that their work is anything but disagreeable, and they are
better off for this honesty.
Myerson identified the isolation of the individual housewife as
well as the boring nature of the work as particularly acute problems:
"Work that is in the main lonely; and work that on the whole leaves
the mind free, leads almost inevitably to day dreaming and intro-
spection. These are essentials, in the housework—monotony, day-
dreaming, and introspection."44 Household efficiency experts such as
Christine Frederick had, of course, been urging women to work
toward the precise goal of standardizing and routinizing their tasks.
What no one had foreseen was the fact that routinized housework
would continue to fill women's time while it starved their brains.
This was because running errands and acting as general factotum
more than filled the time women saved by standardizing work prac-
tices or by the use of labor-saving devices.
Ten years later Myerson published an article in the Journal en-
titled "Remedies for the Housewife's Fatigue." In addition to the
factors eroding the possibility of contentment in the role of house-
wife that he had already identified, he brought up a new one—the
devaluation of motherhood. He spoke of the good old days when
"Freud had not yet corroded the delight of the infant's attachment
to the mother nor the mother's joy in the child, and [John B.]
Watson had not yet destroyed the self-esteem of the mother by
making her worse than worthless in her own eyes."45 That a clinician
singled out the de-skilling and devaluation of the housewife's job as
creating so much female misery suggests that the impact of the
changes on women was substantial. Only research in the letters and
diaries of women themselves can document the exact nature of that
impact.
Finally, one measure of the trivialization of domesticity that had
occurred by 1930 was an article that appeared that year in the soon-
to-be-defunct Woman's journal. Entitled "I Rebel at Rebellion," it
must have made the feminist founders of that periodical uneasy in
their graves. The author claimed to be tired of the new freedom. All
she wanted was to stay home. Happy to be supported by her husband,
she had no regrets about not supporting herself. The article had more
in the same vein.46 Rather than bearing any relationship to the

socially conscious, nineteenth-century ideology of domesticity, the
article anticipated the privatized "Feminine Mystique" that became
full-blown in the 19505. As we shall learn, the American home at
mid-century, cut loose from social, religious, or political moorings, was
sacred only to "Family Togetherness." And the housewife who was
the chief votary of this cult was supposed to eradicate any vestige
of personal ambition or independent thought in order to keep her
family happy.
EIGHT
Naming the Problem
MI 'N 1963 BETTY FRIEDAN published The Feminine Mystique.

In it she wrote feelingly about the "problem that has no name," as
she called the malaise she thought to be afflicting the middle-class
housewife. The book evoked an outpouring of letters from other
women, stirred the publication of responses, and engendered enough
controversy to ensure that Betty Friedan would become one of the
best-known women in the United States. In this chapter we will
explore the context for that publishing event. Why did The Femi-
nine Mystique appear when it did, and why was the response so
powerful?
In order to situate fully The Feminine Mystique, we must return
to the interwar years. The depression decade of the 19305 produced
few changes with respect to domesticity after the tumultuous de-
velopments of the preceding ten years. Moreover, the women's mag-
azines conveyed little of the earlier elan about modern science. Since
the disastrous economic downturn had tarnished the prestige of
American business, there were fewer articles demonstrating how the
housewife could emulate the world of business. That most Americans
had far less in the way of disposable income than had been the case
earlier had a dampening effect, too, on the growth of the culture of
consumption.
197
Ip8 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
One generalization that can be made about the advice to house-

wives in the pages of the Ladies Home Journal in the years just before
the attack on Pearl Harbor is that women were being told to tend
to their knitting—literally. Where Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia
Ward Howe had been virtual embodiments of the Union cause
during the Civil War, and Jane Addams had symbolized for many
the American ability to meet the challenge of the new urban-
industrial order in the early twentieth century—in all cases demon-
strating the salience of domesticity for the society—there was no
parallel female figure as the nation underwent the dual stress of
economic hardship and anxiety about fascism.1 Repeatedly, the Jour-
nal published editorials, articles, or columns in which women were
congratulated on their lack of involvement with large issues and
were enjoined to continue this state of affairs.
A particularly noteworthy example of the genre was the editorial
by Bruce and Beatrice Gould in the September 1938 issue. The female
reader's husband had probably been coming home for years and
making speeches about world problems, speeches that she could not
understand, so the Goulds suggested: "Be glad you're dumb about
all these earth-shaking questions. They don't affect you nearly so
much as a lot of other things much nearer home. . . . The great
problems of the world are all Greek to you—but the problems of your
home and family and community are right down your alley. Be glad
you're dumb while your husband is saving the world—be brave and
you can save the home." The editorial then went on to caution
women against wasting too much time on books, lectures, or discus-
sions. Even Sarah Josepha Hale, who had resolutely opposed woman
suffrage and had refrained from discussing slavery in Godey's, had
assumed more political and intellectual awareness than did the
Goulds—and the Goulds were part of the post-suffrage era.
Dorothy Thompson, one of the leading journalists of the interwar
years, gave advice of a similar nature: "It happens that I have led
most of my life in the thick of problems of the outside world. It has
been an interesting life, and I should not like to have changed it.
But I should hate to see most women so exteriorize their lives as I
have done!" She worried about what would become of the domestic
NAMING THE PROBLEM 199
sphere should this happen. Therefore, she thought that women might
well stay home and knit. When they attended their clubs, those
gatherings should not engage in "superficial" discussions of vast world
problems, she contended. In this way the solid achievements of wom-
en's clubs both in educating their members and in agitating for
change were dismissed.2
If housewives were being told to abjure any interest in changing
the world, they were also being told much more explicitly than ever
before to render personal service to their husbands and to be de-
pendent, especially if they happened to have jobs outside the home.
One expert, after advising working wives to be sure that their hus-
bands had received an adequate quota of small personal services,
addressed husbands as follows: "Make your wife as dependent on
you as you can in all matters relating to the management of your
home and life. There must be a greater percentage of dependence
on the part of a wife than a husband; if this isn't financial, it will
have to be in other matters."3
Given the tenor of these articles, it is not surprising to discover
that Nobel Prize laureate Pearl Buck was shocked by the low status
of American women when she arrived in the United States after
having spent most of her life in China. In a remarkable book pub-
lished in 1941, Of Men and Women, she described her reaction to
this situation and anticipated many of the points that Friedan would
make some twenty years later. That Buck's book appeared at a time
of international crisis is part of the explanation for the fact that it
failed to generate much discussion. More to the point, the changes
of the 19405 and 19505 would make "the problem that has no name"
much more acute, hence more likely to attract public attention. In
any event, Buck's dissection of the housewife's role was far in ad-
vance of the contemporary conventional wisdom.
She began by asserting that "woman's influence is almost totally
lacking in the centers of American national life." A woman's femi-
nine qualities were "despised," a phenomenon of which the woman
herself was quite well aware, so much so that she was the conduit
of these attitudes to the next generation. "What is one to think of
women who deliberately teach their sons to despise women?" That
the dis-esteem entertained by American women for their own gender

struck so forcibly a woman who had spent the better part of her life
in a traditional society not known for prizing women is startling evi-
dence of the toll taken by the devaluation of domesticity.
Buck's description of a housewife's day in a prosperous household
is chilling: "She listens to as much as they will tell her, she reads
as much as she is inclined, she potters about on the fringes of the
world which really goes on without her and comforts herself by hav-
ing a good hot dinner ready at night anyway. It is not enough. The
feeling one has after coming to know American women is that they
are starving at the sources."4 Identifying this as the "Carol Kennicott
problem," Buck was astute about what had caused it. As difficult as
the impact of economic and technological change may have been for
housewives, most fundamental was the loss of moral stature. "More
serious to woman even than the removal of the need for her physical
labor is the fact that she is no longer the spiritual and moral influence
she was once to man and child in the home."8 Because a woman's
loneliness could be so sharp and her talents so underutilized, Buck
urged that husbands begin to take a fair share of domestic responsi-
bility so that their wives could live "a rounded life."
If Buck thought that American housewives were in a crisis state,
from which only the cooperation of husbands could rescue them,
there were many men who thought, to the contrary, that husbands
were the ones who were put-upon. Indeed, in the post-World War I
years a major theme of the American novel and short story was the
predatory housewife. Although one could cite innumerable examples
of this genre, we can examine another of Sinclair Lewis's novels,
Dodsworth (1947), in order to make the acquaintance of a proto-
typical "Great American Bitch."6
Sam Dodsworth is a successful businessman, with more culture
and sensitivity than most, but he has felt inadequate for most of
his married life because his wife Fran is an expert at inducing such
feelings:
She had a high art of deflating him, of enfeebling him, with
one quick, innocent sounding phrase. By the most careless
comment on his bulky new overcoat she could make him feel
NAMING THE PROBLEM 2OI
like a lout in it; by crisply suggesting that he "try for once to

talk about something besides motors and stocks" while they
rode to a formidable dinner to an elocutionary senator, she
could make him feel so unintelligent that he would be silent
all evening. The easy self-confidence which weeks of industrial
triumphs had built up in him she could flatten in five seconds.
She was, in fact, a genius at planting in him an assurance of
his inferiority.7
Sexually cold, emotionally immature, and spoiled, Fran insists that

the two of them take an extended vacation in Europe, a trip that
brings out the worst in her personality. She unloads her husband
for a European count, is herself cast off in turn, but fails to win Sam
back. The book ends with Sam's decision to make a new life with
a more understanding woman—American, too, but much less spoiled
than Fran. At one point, Lewis, speaking of "American wives whom
living in England had not weakened in their view of women's right
to forbid men's rights," suggests that Fran's negative qualities may
be more or less pandemic among American women.8
In plays, too, the predatory housewife appears. In 192.5, George
Kelly introduced Harriet Craig in his Craig's Wife, a Pulitzer Prize-
winning play that was subsequently made into a movie starring
Rosalind Russell in 1936, and remade with Joan Crawford in 1950.
Harriet Craig is unambiguously manipulative. As she first enters,
she is fretting about the screen door being open. We soon learn that
she worships her house, is obsessed with order, and regards her hus-
band principally as the means whereby she can achieve a stable home.
At one point, she cautions her niece that a woman must not allow
romance to put her in the position of "primitive feminine depen-
dence and subjection." Harriet would never be that sentimental her-
self. By the end of the play Walter Craig has come to understand
Harriet's hunger for control. Like Sam Dodsworth, he leaves his
wife—after accusing her of a campaign to reduce him to "one of
those wife-ridden sheep."9
In a pioneering article identifying the literary theme of the bitch/
housewife, Dolores Barracano Schmidt points out that, surprisingly,
the figure who so threatened the male personae of authors such as
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis was not

a career woman or an austere intellectual but rather a conventional
housewife. The housewife's mistake was to be too bossy or to be a
free-spending "parasite," or both. This literary pattern provides fur-
ther evidence of the devaluation of domesticity because the wife who
asserted her claims or defended her values could no longer legitimize
her position through the home. Female assertiveness thus came to
be defined as bitchery. Moreover, the shift in the nature of the house-
wife's role from production to consumption made it seem less like
real work. There began to be a pervasive male fear that women were
getting off too easy, reflected in literature in the interwar years and
more generally in the society after World War II.10 Finally, the
bitch/housewife came to literary prominence in the decade when
women had not only achieved suffrage, but also the old domestic
feminist goal of prohibition, a goal whose capacity to provoke male
anger and a heightened sexual politics we have already discovered.
It is worth pointing out that characters such as Sam Dodsworth and
Walter Craig are especially angry when their wives monitor their
smoking or drinking behavior.
Whether or not the average middle-class housewife had enough
work to occupy her time in 1940, she was certainly likely to find
that she had work in 1943. By that time, of course, millions of house-
wives had gone into the labor force. Those who did not still found
nearly every aspect of their work routine to be adversely affected
by the war: housing was scarce, rationing created long lines at the
grocery store, and millions of soldiers' wives had to be both mother
and father to their children. That the war had a profound impact on
American women because it transformed the character of the female
labor force is so well known as to be a cliche. That it also had a
profound impact on domesticity is only beginning to be understood.11
We can start by examining the way the war affected the American
diet. Lasting more than twice as long as the American involvement
in World War I and thus calling on far more resources, World
War II saw the introduction of a thorough-going rationing of food
that necessitated new recipes and enhanced the acceptability of food
substitutes. Before the war, women had been using canned goods
and packaged products such as crackers and factory-made bread.

During the war, as a result of the shortage of butter, margarine made
its way onto the American table, and so did convenience foods and
meat stretchers. An advertisement for General Mills suggested ex-
tending butter with gelatin, an instance of the adjustments that
people had to make in their ideas about what tastes good.12 By April
1945, the Ladies Home Journal contained advertisements for such
products as Junket quick fudge mix and Chef Boy-ar-dee spaghetti
dinner with sauce, pasta, and cheese all in one box. No doubt the
sheer volume of sales to the military market had given food processors
new ideas about packaging convenience items.13 Furthermore, it was
difficult to bake and put up preserves at home during the war because
of sugar rationing. Then, too, millions of women war workers had
less time than ever before for preparing meals. In consequence, the
war's legacy to the American palate was cake mix—and other types
of processed foods that were closer to being ready-to-eat than any-
thing before. And the level of skill that housewives needed to bring
to cookery declined further.
While women struggled, often unsuccessfully, to provide meals
for their families that approximated prewar meals, they also had to
contend with other problems, petty and large. Household appliances,
parts, and repairmen were all in short supply, for example. It was
hard to find such items as paring knives or egg-beaters. The per-
centage of families owning refrigerators and washing machines actu-
ally fell during the war because consumer durables were hardly the
most urgent priority of American industry.14 Perhaps most painful
was the fact that the wife who was not gainfully employed—who
was, in fact, filling the role she had been trained all her life to fill-
might be subject to subtle or not-so-subtle hints that she was falling
short in her patriotic duty. One instance of this was the fact that a
columnist for the Detroit Free Press actually suggested that a house-
wife should surrender her seat on a bus to a woman war worker.18
The war created geographic mobility on a vast scale because people
moved to get higher-paying war work. This exacerbated a housing
shortage that persisted even into the postwar years. In the late forties
about two and a half million families were still "doubling up" in
housing.18 The large-scale shifts in population also created strains

on school systems. As a consequence, many schools had to institute
half-day sessions. And this in turn meant that thousands of mothers
had their children underfoot for much of the day, often in cramped
quarters.
A novel by Harriette Arnow, The Dollmaker, gives a vivid depic-
tion of what wartime shortages and dislocations mean to a family
that has moved from Kentucky to Detroit. This subject also gives
Arnow the opportunity to deal with the broader topic of the loss
of a craft tradition in the transition to a modern industrial society.
The heroine of the novel, Gertie Nevels, is a country woman whose
passion is not so much housewifery as it is the "male" work of farm-
ing and the "male" hobby of whittling. Nonetheless, Gertie savors
the comfort of her mother's kitchen:
She paused an instant looking around the great room. She

glanced into the wide-mouthed fireplace where her great-
grandmother had baked the bread and cooked all the Kendrick
food, and smiled a little on an unusually large Dutch oven, one
her father had always prized. . . . She crossed the kitchen to
the great cookstove with its high curving legs, and rolled back
the warming-oven door.
. . . It was for an instant as it had been before she married,
when this was home and if she grew hungry at any time of the
day or night she had only to come to the warming oven or go to
the cherry cupboard, where a selection of jams and jellies and
canned and baked goods, especially gingerbread, were kept.
Endlessly replenishing the kitchen, like the widow's barrel,
were the smokehouse, the springhouse, and roothouse.17
Gertie takes pride in her own cooking, too, because when she serves
food to her family, she realizes that "everything, even the meal in
the bread, was a product of her farming."
Gertie's husband, Clovis, takes a job in Detroit, as did so many
rural men and women during the war, lured by the high salaries.
When Gertie arrives in Michigan with the five children, she is
horrified by the housing Clovis has arranged for them. Their apart-
ment is tiny and shed-like, with a kitchen like a 'large closet." To

make matters worse, it is near a steel mill. The children's school, on
half-sessions, is inadequately provisioned and operating without a
cafeteria. The wartime produce is so bad and Gertie is trying so hard
to save money that she finds it nearly impossible to provide appealing
meals for her family. At one point, one of the children refuses to
finish her breakfast, and Gertie wonders what to do: "She looked
at the half-eaten egg, flat-yolked, gray, rubbery white, the biscuit
burned on the bottom, too pale on top, smeared with margarine in-
stead of butter. She wasn't any good at coloring the stuff, but butter
cost so. None of them ate the way they had back home."18 On an-
other occasion, Clovis complains, "Gert, that grub wasn't fitten fer
a dawg."
Arnow contrasts the solid, craft-oriented way of life back in Ken-
tucky with the meretricious consumer culture they encounter in
Detroit. When Clovis surprises Gertie with a huge "Icy Heart"
refrigerator, for example, one of the neighbors is able to recite the
"Icy Heart" radio commercial from memory: "Every woman dreams
of a ten-cubic-foot Icy Heart in her kitchen—Icy Heart power—Icy
Heart. We must hurry up and win the war so we can all go out
and buy Icy Hearts."19 Only her whittling enables Gertie to hang
on to some of her traditional culture. But as the novel ends, even
that is taken away from her. Clovis, fully attuned to the machine
age, has fixed up a jig-saw so that she can turn out her wooden dolls
more quickly. '"Law, Law, Gert,' Clovis said, too pleased that the
contraption had worked to be real quarrelsome. 'You just want some-
thing you can make in a hurry an sell cheap; they could be money
in sich. Sell 'em, say, around Christmas; that hand carven takes too
long ever to make much.' "20 Because they badly need the money, she
has no choice but to assent.
If the housewife at home had to contend with innumerable new
difficulties, the married war worker, "Rosie the Riveter," had special
problems of her own as she tried to discharge all of her domestic
responsibilities. Most pressing was the lack of adequate child care
for the hundreds of thousands of mothers who had entered or re-
entered the labor force. National magazines published articles con-
taining horror stories about the expedients that were being adopted
by desperate mothers. For example, an article in the Woman's Home
Companion quoted a social worker who had testified to a Senate
committee: "I have seen children locked in cars in parking lots in
my valley [the San Fernando Valley] and I have seen children
chained to trailers in San Diego."21 Despite the entry of six million
women into the labor force, many of whom were the mothers of
young children, the federal government's efforts to meet the need
for child care were pathetically inadequate.22 Given this and given
the suddenness of the demand, the private sector's ability to supply
that demand was inadequate as well. Grandmothers were pressed
into service, children lived with relatives other than their parents
in some instances, and most mothers doubtless found more humane
solutions to their problems than locking their children in a car.
Nonetheless, the toll on mothers and children both—in anxiety and
neglect respectively—was substantial.
Another grave difficulty for the woman war worker was the length
of her workday. The case histories of such women in national maga-
zines tell of grueling work schedules involving swing shifts and
seven-day work weeks combined with all of the domestic difficulties
imposed by rationing and shortages. The United Auto Workers sent
out a questionnaire to its women members, asking what would make
their lives easier. The respondents asked for help with child care,
better shopping hours, shorter work days, better transportation, and
better planned production.23 What women war workers actually
received was very little in the way of publicly supported services.
In Britain there were several types of special services for gainfully
employed housewives, such as one free afternoon a week for shop-
ping, central kitchens that served over three million meals a week
at cost, and welfare officers at war plants.24 In America, a gainfully
employed housewife was on her own.
Despite the pious proclamations that our boys were fighting to
protect the American home, the American home was not deemed
worthy of any genuine investment of societal resources. Both the
scarcity of supplies for domestic purposes and the paucity of services
for Rosie the Riveter conveyed this message. Given this, the woman
who was "just a housewife" could hardly have escaped wondering

whether her contribution to her society was appreciated.25
In some instances, the message of disdain for the American house-
wife during the war years was explicit rather than implicit. Most
notorious was the attack on "Mom" by Philip Wylie in his best-
selling diatribe, A Generation of Vipers. Wylie directed his main
artillery against the "third sex" of post-menopausal women. In the
good old days, "mom folded up and died of hard work somewhere
in the middle of her life." Now, because she has a man to maintain
her, she survives "to stamp and jibber . . . a noisy neuter by natural
default or a scientific gelding."28 No matter what she turns to, she
brings disaster in her wake. Her presence at the ballot box has been
responsible for a "new all-time low in political scurviness." Her clubs
afford her merely the opportunity to nose into other people's busi-
ness. And Wylie thought there were so many "moms." "Never be-
fore has a great nation of brave and dreaming men absent-mindedly
created a huge class of idle, middle-aged women."27
Beyond the substance of his attack—most of which has to do with
Mom's idleness and her consequent attempts to bind her sons to
her so as to fill her time—the language he employs indicates rage
rather than mere criticism. He speaks of the "beady brains behind
their beady eyes" and the "stones in the center of their fat hearts."
Mom is "a middle-aged puffin." That anger so excessive fueled a
book going into numerous printings suggests that A Generation of
Vipers had tapped a fund of inchoate male rage in the larger society.
Mom became a popular scapegoat. "Are American Moms a Men-
ace?" queried an article in the Journal in November 1945. The
author, Amram Scheinfeld, pointed out that "among abject failures
we find a high proportion of mother's sons"—like Adolf Hitler.
Shortly before the war ended, Life ran an editorial on "American
Women." "Draft Them? Too Bad We Can't Draft Their Grand-
mothers" proclaimed the subtitle. Obviously influenced by Wylie,
the editorial alleged extensive female idleness. "American women,
as a class, even more than men, have a lot to learn about the respon-
sibilities of all-around citizenship and their role in the modern
world."28 Two years later, Life ran a long feature on the "American
2o8 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
Woman's Dilemma." No woman's dilemma was more acute than

that of the woman over forty, according to the article: "The Bureau
of Labor Statistics lists 20 million women, nearly half of all adult
female Americans, as essentially idle. They do not have children
under 18, they are not members of the labor force, they do not work
on farms, nor are they aged or infirm. With not nearly enough to
do, many of them are bored stiff." While the tone of the writing
conveys a certain sympathy for this plight, the illustrations accom-
panying the article perpetuate Wyliesque stereotypes. There are pic-
tures of bored-looking women playing bridge and depictions of the
"props for idle hours" like Photoplay, pills, chocolate, or a dog. All
of this documents a "desert of wasted time."29 There could be no
more cruel reminder of the essential functionlessness of the older
woman in the culture of consumption than the reduction of the last
several decades of a woman's life to "a desert of wasted time."
However idle an older woman might have been deemed to be, no
one was encouraging women to pursue careers on the same terms
as men. Quite the contrary. The women's magazines celebrated the
woman who was willing to sacrifice her own ambition for the more
important goal of her husband's career. In April 1945, for example,
the regular "How America Lives" feature of the Journal (a feature
that ran for more than twenty years and hence provides an excellent
source for the historian) focused on the Eck family. Mrs. Eck had
had a promising career on the concert stage, but the tension of try-
ing to fill multiple roles had induced a nervous breakdown. As a
consequence, she gave up her career so as to devote herself to her
children and to furthering her husband's career as a supermarket
manager. Reflecting on her choice, she said, "The career I am edu-
cating them [her daughters] for is marriage, pure and simple. . . .
It's the only lasting happiness a woman can have. . . . The sooner
a woman makes a real home for a man, the sooner he will become
successful and can give her a better house, servants, lovely clothes
and so on. . . . Few men ever amount to much when their wives
work/-
Indeed, it is a scholarly commonplace that the rapid changes
ushered in by the war contributed to considerable anxiety about the
NAMING THE PROBLEM 2Op
role of women in the postwar years. "Moms" were blamed for the
high rate of emotional instability among inductees into the army, and
working mothers received the blame for juvenile delinquency. The
very health and survival of American society required women to
maintain their traditional roles in the eyes of many commentators.30
The most sophisticated presentation of this general argument ap-
peared in Modern Woman: The Lost Sex by Ferdinand Lundberg
and Marynia Farnham. Acknowledging that the changes of the past
century had removed many functions from the home and had left
housewives in increasing isolation, Lundberg and Farnham nonethe-
less insisted that the feminist response to these changes had been
inherently neurotic, based on "deep illness." In fact, they argued,
women have become so maladjusted that they have been responsible
for widespread unhappiness: "Throughout, it will be seen, women
are the principal transmitting media of the disordered emotions that
today are so widely spread throughout the world and are reflected
in the statistics of social disorder."31 Only if women were to reestab-
lish their essential dependence on men and stay home could they
and their families achieve contentment.
Yet as housewifery became increasingly de-skilled, staying home
became increasingly unsatisfying. An article in the April 1947 issue
of the Journal discussed the phenomenon of radio soap opera in this
context. In the eyes of the author, Aloise Buckley Heath, herself a
housewife, the housewife's day was something to be endured rather
than enjoyed because of the "many daily activities of a woman which
require utter mindlessness." Soap operas helped fill the fourteen hours
every day in which she had "work on her hands and nothing on her
mind." That the specific content of the soap opera may have mattered
less than its ready accessibility to a stay-at-home woman is suggested
by another article a few years later. In this, the plight of a family
newly arrived in a small city was discussed. With four small children
and few acquaintances, the woman in question could go for days
with hardly any adult conversation. Her method of filling the void
in her life was to read her way through a thirty-volume encyclopedia.
That way she could keep from being overwhelmed by loneliness.32
By the early 19505 the contours of what Betty Friedan would label
"the feminine mystique" had emerged clearly. After the privations

of depression and war, early marriage and large families had come
into fashion. The grim events of the preceding twenty years had
made it difficult to believe in the individual's capacity to have a posi-
tive influence on his or her society. Therefore, the home once more
became a haven, but an apolitical one, unlike the home of the ante-
bellum years. In an age of anxiety engendered by the Cold War and
the nuclear threat, the chief quality desired of women was that they
be soothing. An article in the series "Making Marriage Work" in the
Journal advised a wife in this fashion: "Cater to his tastes—in food,
in household arrangements, even in your appearance. Indulging his
wishes, even if they are whims, is a sure way of convincing him
that you really want to please him."33 The woman who was reluctant
to cater to the whims of another adult was unfeminine, according
to the best wisdom of the day.
The 19505' woman projected her femininity in her clothing, too.
Not since the late nineteenth century had women's clothes so em-
phasized the wasp waist nor been so constraining. Women wore
"Merry Widow" brassieres that cinched in their waists, crinoline
petticoats under full skirts, tight girdles under straight skirts, and
spike heels. If the good wife was supposed to think constantly and
selflessly about how best to please her husband, the dictates of fash-
ion reinforced the message that women existed to please men rather
than as beings in their own right who warranted comfort.
The message that female ambition was not to be taken seriously
was found not only in psychological treatises like Modern Woman:
The Lost Sex but also in the new medium of television. The most
famous housewife in the United States in the early fifties was Lucy
Ricardo of "I Love Lucy." Week after week, Lucy connived at get-
ting into her husband's nightclub act. Week after week, her loving,
tolerant, yet firm husband foiled her attempts. Lucy's place was at
home or else in the company of her best friend Ethel Mertz, and not
in the public eye. When she attempted to perform, she was invari-
ably ridiculous.34
The career woman was a well-identified threat to the social order,
but so, too, was the housewife who had insufficiently purged herself
of her unfeminine traits. In December 1956, Life ran an article

entitled "Changing Roles in Modern Marriage." After explaining
how feminism, although a thing of the past, had nonetheless pro-
duced the fatal error of the career woman syndrome, the author went
on to caution that, even if the wife did not have a career, there might
still be problems: "If there is such a thing as a 'suburban syndrome,'
it might take this form: the wife, having worked before marriage,
or at least having been educated and socially conditioned toward the
idea that work (preferably some kind of intellectual work, in an
office, among men) carries prestige," may well become depressed
about being "just a housewife." Even if she avoids this, "her humilia-
tion still seeks an outlet. This may take various forms: in destructive
gossip about other women, in raising hell at the PTA, in becoming
a dominating mother. . . . In her disgruntlement, she can work
as much damage to the lives of her husband and children (and her
own life) as if she were a career woman, and indeed sometimes
more."35 The "normal," feminine woman would be happy staying
at home. One who was unhappy was, in fact, by definition not
normal.
Yet the sources of self-esteem for the housewife were still dwin-
dling. Arguably, the nadir of American cookery came in the fifties.
This was the heyday of prepared foods and the cream-of-mushroom-
soup school of cuisine whereby the cook could pour a can of this
product over anything that was not a dessert and create a culinary
treat according to the standards of the day. Although Friedan was
to contend that women in the 19505 were being enjoined to chain
themselves to their stoves, such was not the case. The women's mag-
azines promoted "quick and easys," using convenience foods, canned
goods, and the like. One issue of the Journal, for example, contained
recipes calling for canned pears, canned sweet potatoes, frozen broc-
coli, pudding mix, canned salmon, and bakery apple pie to which
the housewife was supposed to add a slice of cheese.38 In 1960, Peg
Bracken published the I Hate To Cook Book, whose animating spirit
was summarized as follows: "Some women, it is said, like to cook.
This book is not for them."37 One might well ponder what there was
to like about cooking as it was usually practiced circa 1960. One
hundred years earlier, techniques and recipes had been zealously

preserved treasures. In 1960 "creativity" consisted in combining a
pudding mix with a cake mix and adding extra salad oil rather than
merely following the instructions on the package of cake mix.
Perhaps the most consequential development for housewives in
the 19505, however, was the simultaneous growth of suburban hous-
ing tracts and of the highway system, changes that represented the
maturation of the culture of consumption after World War II. In-
expensive homes and financing after the war plus "practically uni-
versal car ownership" combined to produce 37 million suburban
residents by 1950, a figure that would nearly double by 1970. Sub-
urbia has been subjected to a great deal of easy and cliched criticism,
and in fact there is not much positive to say about it as a locale for
the stay-at-home housewife. Suburban housing patterns reinforced
a woman's isolation from most of the world of adults. And the per-
centage of a woman's day spent chauffeuring other family members
about increased exponentially. Even if she was not gainfully em-
ployed outside the home, she often needed to resort to convenience
foods in order to maintain the driving schedule intact. Moreover, as
a result of these changes, she began to seem like a servant to her
children as well as to her husband.
By the mid-fifties the women's magazine began to reflect concern
about the plight of the young housewife—although their analyses fell
far short of what Friedan would achieve a few years later. The
Journal sponsored a forum that brought together four young mothers,
assorted experts, and the magazine's editors to discuss the subject.
Too much was expected of the young mother, and she suffered from
too much isolation—these were the major conclusions. The anthro-
pologist Ashley Montagu suggested that women should organize to
improve their situation. Beatrice Gould of the Journal thought that
this was unlikely to happen because the housewife's self-esteem had
been too badly eroded for her to be capable of advocacy on her own
behalf.38
While the women's magazines were alternately promoting family
"togetherness," a campaign launched by McCall's in 1954, and
acknowledging the existence of widespread female misery, the mag-
azines aimed at the male market took a rather different approach to

male-female relations. As Barbara Ehrenreich demonstrates in The
Hearts of Men, whether promoting indoor recreation a la Playboy
or outdoor recreation a la True, these magazines resolutely rejected
togetherness as an appropriate goal for the American male. What is
more, rather than displaying any sympathy for a housebound wife,
the editors were likely to run features displaying either undisguised
contempt for her or else resentment of her "idleness."
Tired of the Rat Race?

Fed up with Job Routine?
Well, then . . . how would you like to make $8000,
$ao,ooo—as much as $50,000 and wore—working at home in
your Spare Time? No selling! No commuting! No time clocks
to punch
BE YOUR OWN BOSS!!!
Yes, an Assured Lifetime Income can be yours now, in an easy,
low-pressure, part-time job that will permit you to spend most
of each and every day as you please . . ,39
This was the way an article in Playboy satirized the housewife's job
in 1963. Again, the point must be made that the contrast with the
literature aimed at men in the antebellum years could not have been
greater. At that time, male readers had been cautioned that moral
striving would be required before they could be worthy of the angels
to whom they were wed. The tenor of advice to men after World
War II was that they had a right to be self-centered and self-
indulgent. The wife who would not accept this was, by implication
if not by explicit charge, a bitch.
Ehrenreich makes the further point that in the fifties the bread-
winner role to many commentators began to seem so onerous as to
be dangerous to men's health. In addition, then, to the other reasons
for catering to her husband and ministering to his ego, a wife began
to receive warnings in the pages of the women's magazines that fail-
ure to do her utmost to take care of her man might well result in
his early death by heart attack.40 Playboy told him to enjoy himself;
the Journal told her that she could not be too cautious about pro-
tecting his health.
By the 19505 domesticity was no longer capable of inspiring liter-
ary treatment by women other than as a source of pathology. And
no woman writer had more negative things to say about domesticity
than Anne Sexton—perhaps because no other major woman writer
of the period had been so thoroughly immersed in the housewife
role herself. Anne Gray Harvey eloped to marry Alfred Sexton in
August 1948, when she was nineteen years old. Having been too
rebellious a teenager to be a good student, she was launched into
the world of adult responsibilities without much in the way of an
education. She came, therefore, to her vocation of poet by a circui-
tous route—as a form of therapy after being hospitalized for suicidal
depression:
Until I was twenty-eight I had a kind of buried self who didn't
know she could do anything but make white sauce and diaper
babies. I didn't know I had any creative depths. I was a vic-
tim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream.
All I wanted was a litde piece of life, to be married, to have
children. I thought the nightmares, the visions, the demons
would go away if there was enough love to put them down. I
was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life for that
was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband
wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to
keep nightmares out. The surface cracked when I was about
twenty-eight. I had a psychotic break and tried to kill myself.41
Discussing this passage, her biographer, Diane Middlebrook, com-

ments, "Like many of the housewives Betty Friedan was interview-
ing for her book The Feminine Mystique, Sexton experienced the
home as a sphere of confinement and stultification."
From the mid-fifties, when she first received encouragement for
her poetry, to her death by suicide in 1974, the outward events of
Sexton's life were remarkable. As Middlebrook puts it:
In April 1960, Anne Sexton for the first time wrote "poet"
rather than "housewife" in the "occupation" block of her in-
come tax return. Married since 1948, mother of two daughters,

Sexton had been publishing poetry for three years. The change
in her status as citizen was significant for Sexton and for
American literature. No poet before her had written so
frankly of the female realm of family life, nor of its pathologies.
And few poets, women or men, achieved success so expedi-
tiously: nine years from drafting her first poem to being
awarded the Pulitzer Prize.42
Domesticity was for Sexton as constricting a prison as it had been

for Charlotte Perkins Gilman. When the illness became acute, Sexton
was incapable of maintaining household routines or of caring for
her children—sometimes for years at a time. One of her letters
reveals that occasionally she experienced a sense of repose and peace
while at home:
I feel today at home at home. You remember I said I didn't

feel at home in life. Well that was almost always any life—not
just the outside world—more the outside than my home here.
But sometimes, all my life really, I've stayed home hiding from
the world. Hiding is different from being "at home." Today,
just now, I was working around the kitchen singing at the top
of my lungs.43
The evidence of the poetry suggests, however, that these moods were
rare. More often, home represented not so much solace as defeat and
denial of one's full humanity. And her long-term identity as a house-
wife inspired revulsion:
HOUSEWIFE
Some women marry houses.

It's another kind of skin; it has a heart,
a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
The walls are permanent and pink.
See how she sits on her knees all day
faithfully washing herself down.
Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah
into their fleshy mothers.
2l66 JUST A HOUSEWIFE
A woman is her mother.

That's the main thing.44
Sexton published this poem in a collection entitled All My Pretty
Ones that came out in 1962. From the late fifties, when her first
poems started appearing in print, she wrote in an entirely unprece-
dented way about the particulars of the female condition such as
menstruation, abortion, and mother-daughter relationships. Because
she so captured the public imagination, one can only infer that she
was articulating the feelings of other women. To be a housewife in
the United States in 1960 might well open a woman up to negative
emotions.
Perhaps the quintessential suburban housewife of the 19505 in
a novel by a male writer was Betsy Rath, wife of Tom Rath, the title
character in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The Raths struggle
with such typical issues of the day as suburban housing develop-
ments and better school systems. Betsy, although not gainfully em-
ployed and not in possession of many ideas of her own, does have
an attractive spunky quality. Nonetheless, she is at best an adjunct
to her husband as he goes through a series of moral crises, which he
decides on his own. And the author, Sloan Wilson, reveals no real
insight into what this situation might cost a woman of spirit. One
passage in particular embodies the conventional wisdom that the
American housewife of the period was "spoiled."
"You're talking like a typical American Woman," Tom said
disgustedly. "You want it both ways. 'Don't play it safe,' you
say, 'and can we get a new car tomorrow?' "4S
Tom then accuses Betsy of having had an easy life. On another
occasion (when he is confessing an episode of wartime adultery) he
urges, "Try to be adult about this."
In Mrs. Bridge, a novel that appeared just a few years after The
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Evan Connell does demonstrate in-
sight into the housewife's dilemma. The title character, married to
a successful man and the mother of three children, lives with her
family in Kansas City. A thoroughly conventional woman, devoted
to her family's interests and eager to please, Mrs. Bridge gradually
loses the ability to know her own mind enough to render opinions
on subjects of any consequence. When the Bridges go out for a
social evening, Mrs. Bridge is happiest if they are with another
couple, both members of which are predictable. Then she can tell
the husband what he wants to hear without needing to do much
guesswork. A telling episode is the suicide of one of Mrs. Bridge's
close friends, Grace Barren:
She often wondered if anyone other than herself had been

able to divine the motive; if so, it went unmentioned. But she
herself had found it instinctively less than an instant after
hearing the news: her first thought had been of an afternoon
on the Plaza when she and Grace Barren had been looking for
some way to occupy themselves, and Grace had said, a little
sadly, "Have you ever felt like those people in the Grimm fairy
tale—the ones who were all hollowed out in the back?"46
Unlike Wilson, Connell had figured out that starvation of the ego
was bad for the development of an adult personality.
There were, then, a few glimmerings of insight into female malaise
that went beyond blaming "neurotic" women for their illegitimate
aspirations that appeared before Friedan published her indictment
of the problem that has no name. For the most part, however, the
media paid little attention to them. The election of John F. Kennedy
in 1960 signaled the coming of a new, more vigorous generation into
power and the start of a new dispensation in American society. No
doubt this contributed to the reception accorded to Friedan's book
when it appeared in 1963.
In the 19805 The Feminine Mystique must be dealt with in two
ways: as a document and as an analysis. In the first instance, the
book is an invaluable source; in the second instance, its value is
undercut by the author's lack of historical perspective. Friedan was
angry about the developments of the 19505 and exaggerated the nov-
elty of the suburban housewife's plight relative to earlier decades.
Also, writing before the rebirth of women's history, she lacked any
insight into the nineteenth-century version of domesticity.
The genesis of the book came in Friedan's decision to survey some
two hundred of her classmates in the Smith College Class of 1942

fifteen years after graduation. Sifting through their responses and
pondering her own life, she came to believe that there was a radical
disjunction between the popular image of the suburban housewife
surrounded by the bounty of a consumption-oriented society and the
private reality of women's lives. The strongest part of the book lies
in her exposition of the housewife's malaise, "the strange, dissatisfied
voice stirring within her."
It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the

desperation of so many American women. This is not what
being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. For hu-
man suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not
been found because the right questions have not been asked, or
pressed far enough. I do not accept the answer that there is no
problem because American women have luxuries that women
in other times and lands never dreamed of. ...
If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the
minds of so many American women today is not a matter of loss
of femininity or too much education or the demands of domes-
ticity. It is far more important than anyone recognizes. It is the
key to these other new and old problems which have been tor-
turing women and their husbands and children, and puzzling
their doctors and educators for years. It may well be the key to
our future as a nation and a culture. We can no longer ignore
that voice within women that says, "I want something more
than my husband and my children, and my home."47
Having begun by sketching out the dimensions of the problem,

Friedan went on to identify multiple sources of difficulty for women,
including Freudian psychology, functionalist social science that en-
shrined the status quo as the norm, educators who failed to respect
female intellectual abilities, and the manipulations of advertisers
eager to sell products to housewives. Too angry to be altogether fair,
she assumed that the housewife role was merely something from
which women needed to be liberated. She gave no consideration to
the issue of how many interesting careers the society might have at
its disposal, and whether there would be enough to go around.
NAMING THE PROBLEM 2Ip
Would the woman who could only find a menial job outside the
home be that much better off than the housewife? This, too, was an
issue that Friedan ignored. Finally, were there any components of the
housewife role that might be worth preserving? If there were, Friedan
did not mention them. Rather, she argued that women needed "some
higher purpose than housework and thing-buying." Moreover, she
claimed that "women have outgrown the housewife role" [emphasis
in the original]. Clearly, she herself had internalized the societal con-
tempt for housewifery that lay just beneath the pious surface. Like
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she seriously undervalued the female con-
tribution to society.
Although the analysis might have been flawed, The Feminine
Mystique deserves to take its place as one of the most influential
books written by an American in the twentieth century. Friedan had
named the problem, and the public discourse about the housewife
was never again the same. Before she published her book, women
were most often blamed personally for their unhappiness. Afterwards,
there began to be an appreciation that social arrangements could re-
ceive some of the blame for female unhappiness.
As soon as the book appeared, Friedan found herself at the center
of a media blitz. The women's magazines, initially hostile to her ap-
proach, could no longer ignore her. Life, McCall's, Harper's, TV
Guide, and the Ladies Home Journal all ran articles by or about her.
Interviewed on television, alternately praised and vilified, she con-
sistently challenged the conventional wisdom about women. As a re-
sult, she began to receive letters from women all over the country,
many filled with outrage and many others with relief. These letters,
with the writers' names inked out for privacy, are now housed at the
Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. A perusal of a small sample of them
confirms that Friedan had touched a responsive chord in the minds
of many women:
But who cares about a "helpless" lonely housewife's life being

wasted away by the kitchen sink. About all the millions of
potentialities whittling away in quiet desperation . . .
Thank you so much for The Feminine Mystique. It was such a
relief to find my feelings and thoughts are not so outrageous

after all. For the last three years I was convinced I was becom-
ing ill. No one will ever know how many times I have fled
into the bathroom to cry because I couldn't conquer that hor-
rible, restless, all at ends feeling.
As I sat down to read it, I had the strangest sensation that you
had studied me and then written a book concerning the whole
"nameless problem."
I feel so moved to express my thanks to you that I have not
even waited to finish reading your wonderful book, The Femi-
nine Mystique. It seemed to me, as I read, that I was saying
almost every page or quote, "Why that's me. That's the way I
have felt." I found I was reading with absorption that left me
physically trembling.48
The most carefully thought-out response to Friedan from the other

side came from Phyllis McGinley in her book, Sixpence in Her
Shoe, published in 1964. A poet and the mother of two daughters,
McGinley insisted that her role as a housewife had given her great
satisfaction. In essence, she restated the doctrine of separate male
and female spheres in order to bolster the position of the housewife.
In an ideal society, "the two nations, male and female, would each
inhabit a sphere snugly suited to its ordained capabilities." Conced-
ing that some women might be better off gainfully employed than at
home, she nonetheless insisted that society requires carefully drawn
boundaries between gender roles. Toward that end, women must be
"self-immolators."49
McGinley's critics may well have wondered how much she had
practiced self-immolation herself. Few people who publish multiple
volumes of poetry, as she had, do so out of the desire to obliterate
their own egos. Moreover, we may also wonder how much McGinley
understood of the contemporary suburban housewife's situation. Her-
self one of the small minority of housewives with live-in domestic
help, in touch with the literary world of New York, she could hardly
have identified with the plight of the woman who tried to read her
way through the entire encyclopedia for company. Yet McGinley
did understand that the housewife role was being undervalued by

most Americans.
The developments of the last twenty years—such as the rebirth of
feminism and feminism's relationship to its housewife constituency-
would furnish the subject for a book in their own right. A study con-
ducted in 1970, whose subjects came to maturity when the "Feminine
Mystique" was flourishing, can, however, provide a coda to our dis-
cussion of the devaluation of domesticity. In a doctoral dissertation
in psychology undertaken at Michigan, Judith Birnbaum studied a
group of eighty-one women of approximately the same age and edu-
cational background, all of whom had graduated from college be-
tween 1945 and 1955. One-third were housewives, one-third were
married professionals, and one-third were single professionals. Birn-
baum gave her subjects a forty-one-page, self-administered question-
naire that included a number of open-ended questions. Interestingly,
not only did the housewives display lower self-esteem in general, but
they also had lower self-esteem than did the married professionals in
their assessment of their own child-care skills. The housewives were
lonelier, were more negative about menopause, and experienced far
more uncertainty about what they wanted from life than did the
married professionals, Birnbaum concluded, "It is not surprising that
involutional melancholia is so common among middle-aged, middle-
class women, and unfortunately the homemaker seems already a vul-
nerable pushover to just such difficulties."50
One housewife's response, apologetic because of her tardiness in
returning the questionnaire, epitomizes the erosion of self about
which Friedan had written:
Please excuse me for being so long completing the booklet. I

am very poor at writing and as the years go by, my bad habit of
"putting off" difficult tasks becomes worse. I hope this is not
too late to be of some assistance. I feel rather guilty with some
of my responses—but I guess it is because I never admitted
them to anyone but myself.51
The writer, a forty-six-year-old mother of four, had been, as had been

all of Birnbaum's subjects, a gifted student. No matter. Years of be-
ing "just a housewife" had left their imprint. By the 19605, the
woman who was supposed to provide emotional support for her family
and in essence underwrite the psychological well-being of her society
was all too likely to be herself in a state of demoralization.
Thus the complex of social, political, and cultural factors that had
created the ideology of domesticity and an enhanced possibility for
self-respect on the part of the housewife had dissolved by the mid-
twentieth century. As we have seen, the rise of an urban-industrial
society in the late nineteenth century and the rapid conquest of edu-
cated opinion by evolutionary theory combined to make the home
seem ineffectual. The female craft tradition succumbed to de-skilling
and devaluation by experts who, ironically enough, were dedicated
to "helping" women. Moreover, where a nineteenth-century notable
housewife had been assumed to play an active role in promoting the
good society, the culture of consumption that took shape in the 19205
required her to play the passive role of spending freely. After World
War II the level of skill involved in cooking—no doubt that area of
housework with the most potential for inspiring job satisfaction—de-
clined to an all-time low. And in the 19505 millions of women found
themselves living in suburbs and therefore spending many hours each
week performing the service role of chauffeur, instead of engaged in
productive work.
The "problem" took generations to develop, but after Friedan
named it, the explosive pace of change within a relatively short time
demonstrates how many women were affected by it. As Pearl Buck
had written in 1941, they were "starving at the sources."
Afterwordd
M ?N THE MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS since the publication of The

Feminine Mystique there have been vast changes in the lives of
American women, most of them for the better. The majority of
women, including those who are married, are now gainfully em-
ployed outside the home. Although most women workers are still
underpaid relative to men and are still disproportionately employed
in the "pink collar ghetto," the fact remains that women today have
opportunities that were undreamed-of twenty years ago. A powerful
feminist movement came into being in the late sixties and early
seventies and mobilized women to effect change. Public policy began
to be responsive to the needs of women in an unprecedented fashion.
Women now make up a substantial portion of the classes at law and
medical schools. Higher education is beginning to have a more equi-
table representation of women faculty, and curricular changes have
afforded woman-centered topics more time in the classroom. A "gen-
der gap" has materialized in the voting behavior of men and women,
thus creating a new interest on the part of politicians in their female
constituents. Women are beginning to be taken seriously as candi-
dates for major office, and a woman sits on the Supreme Court. In
223
other words, women have more access to social, economic, and politi-
cal power than ever before.
As is well known, the civil rights and student movements of the
19605 played critical roles in catalyzing the rebirth of feminism.
Young women who came together to fight for social justice or to pro-
test the war in Southeast Asia discovered that they shared "the bonds
of womanhood" (as had their sisters of the nineteenth century in the
abolitionist movement). Tragically, many of these young white
women felt alienated from the woman's culture represented by their
own mothers, whose lives were subject to the demoralizing influences
we have been discussing. It was, therefore, especially important for
young white women in the sixties to go south, as so many did, and
to encounter black women whose roles in their communities were
altogether different than those of middle-class white women in the
North.
Perhaps the only positive way in which domesticity played a role
in the formulation of modern feminism was in this encounter be-
tween southern black women and the young northerners to whom
they were inspirational figures. The southern black women belonged
to households in which the consumer goods of twentieth-century
America were relatively less available than they were in middle-class
strata of society. The black women's domestic skills were thus more
immediately apparent to their families and to outsiders. In fact, many
northerners wrote letters home in which they extolled the cooking of
the southerners. (Moreover, black women have always been gain-
fully employed outside the home at a greater rate than in the white
community, another way in which they could be seen as making a
material contribution to the welfare of their families.) For many rea-
sons, then, the black women seemed admirable to northern students.1
With this exception, modern feminism might be said to have been
born out of the repudiation of women's traditional roles and not out
of the desire both to glorify and to expand those roles as in the nine-
teenth century. In no other country in the world was there such a
contradiction between woman's nominal freedom to do anything and
the actual contempt for female capabilities, especially those mani-
fested in the housewife, as in the United States in 1963. Moreover,
AFTERWORD 225
few, if any, Americans retained knowledge of a nineteenth-century

female craft tradition that had empowered women to effect change.
For these reasons, feminists were unable to use either their own his-
tory or woman's culture to fashion a movement. The loss of this his-
tory as well as the widespread contempt for housewives in the culture
made it difficult for feminists to build bridges to their potential house-
wife constituency.
There are signs that this situation may be changing, however. In
the resurgence of interest in food I see more than merely a manifesta-
tion of the affluent at play. After so many decades of sensory depriva-
tion where their palates are concerned, Americans of varied circum-
stances are rediscovering one of life's more important pleasures, a
good meal. Younger women and men are increasingly willing to pre-
pare food from scratch. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that a
craft tradition in cookery is being reborn.
Furthermore, many feminists are beginning to talk about their
domestic priorities. Recognizing the divergent approaches to domes-
ticity based on regional, racial, and class differences, I think that we
have enough in common to develop a program that would enable us
to ask the state for better policy, employers for more flexible work
arrangements—especially where the interests of young children are
concerned—and our loved ones for more equitable sharing of domes-
tic responsibility. This, in turn, might enable the building of bridges
to more traditional women.
Can home, the site where many of the emotions that make us most
fully human are fostered, survive and prosper in the late twentieth
century? Can it survive and prosper without entailing the exploita-
tion of women? Can technology be tamed to serve human needs?
These are open questions. What is not an open question is the fact
that all of us need home, whatever our particular household arrange-
ments might be. Inevitably, in a complex, bureaucratic society, work-
place decisions must be made on meritocratic grounds. The market-
place revolves around the cash nexus. If our social geography is to
have any locale where love counts for more than merit or profit, then
home will have to be that place. To say this does not mean that the
private sphere has more intrinsic worth than the public sphere.
Rather, there are certain important values that are generated in each
realm. A disproportionate emphasis on one realm at the expense of
the other impoverishes the whole of life.
We cannot go back—nor would we want to—to the nineteenth-
century home. But we can learn from history, and we can be sus-
tained by the heritage of women and men like Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, and Samuel May. It seems to
me that the essence of what they have to teach us is as follows: the
good society and the good home are inextricably intertwined.
Notes
Introduction
i. The Schlesinger Library of Women's History at Radcliffe College,
Cambridge, Mass., has the Friedan papers, which include the letters re-
ceived by Friedan in response to the publication of The Feminine Mys-
tique.
ONE The Emergence of a New Ideology

1. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of
Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New
York: Basic Books, 1983), chapter 2 -passim.
2. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Ex-
perience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown,
1980), 38.
3. Ibid.
4. See Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic
Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper &
Row, 1966), and Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American
Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750—1800 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1982).
5. Cowan, More Work for Mother; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good
227
228 NOTES
Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New En-
gland, 1650-1750 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982).
6. Carole Shammas, "The Domestic Environment in Early Modern
England and America," Journal of Social History 14 (Fall 1980): 4—24;
Lois Green Can and Lorena S. Walsh, "Inventories and the Analysis of
Wealth and Consumption Patterns in St. Mary's County, Maryland,
1658-1777," Historical Methods 13 (Spring 1980): 81-104.
7. Shammas, "The Domestic Environment," 14.
8. Cowan, More Work for Mother, 21-24.
9. Sally Smith Booth, Hung, Strung, & Potted: A History of Eating
in Colonial America (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1971)7 '74- On
the diet of New England see Sarah Frances McMahon, " 'A Comfortable
Subsistence': A History of Diet in New England," Ph.D. dissertation,
Brandeis Univ., 1982.
10. Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 155.
11. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology
in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press,
1980), 28 3 f.
12. Amelia Simmons, American Cookery, a facsimile of the first edi-
tion, 1796, with an essay by Mary Tolford Wilson (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1958). A paperback reprint (Boston: Rowan Tree Press,
1982) has helpful annotations, too. It should be pointed out that Amelia
Simmons borrowed freely from English sources. On the changing culi-
nary standards of the eighteenth century see Sarah Frances McMahon,
" 'A Comfortable Subsistence.' "
Though other approaches might be possible—using needlework, for
example—I will use cookbooks to document the ebb and flow of a craft
tradition among American housewives wherever appropriate because I
feel competent to generalize in this area. I have learned a great deal from
Joseph Carlin and the other Culinary Historians of Boston. Anthropolo-
gists, not the least of whom has been Claude Levi-Strauss, have been
aware of the cultural significance of food and cookery for quite some time.
It is high time for cultural historians to use this approach, too.
13. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 2-13.
14. Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family from the Revolu-
tion to the Present (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), 8.
15. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England,
1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
16. Degler, At Odds, 8. See also Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness:
NOTES 229
Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.

Press, 1983).
17. Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Mod-
ern Child Nurture (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1968);
Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New En-
gland, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977).
18. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-
Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1983). I
suspect that only the very wealthiest women held themselves entirely
aloof from doing housework. See, for example, Catherine Clinton's de-
scriptions of the heavy domestic responsibilities of plantation mistresses
in her The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (New
York: Pantheon, 1982). See further, Susan Strasser, Never Done: A His-
tory of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 163. Strasser
points out that in 1870 the United States census listed only one domes-
tic servant for every 8.4 families in the population.
19. Dudden, Serving Women, 44.
20. John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), 7of.
21. Kathleen Ann Smallzreid, The Everlasting Pleasure: Influences
on America's Kitchens, Cooks and Cookery from 1565 to the Year 2000
(New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956), 120.
22. Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail, 7of.
23. Cowan, More Work for Mother, 54.
24. Ibid., 53-62.
25. Simmons, American Cookery, 12.
26. I have been very much influenced by John L. Hess and Karen
Hess's lively polemic, The Taste of America (New York: Grossman,
1977). After cooking out of a large number of old cookbooks, the Hesses
state unequivocally that American cookery was at its high point during
this period. See also Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont, Eating
in America: A History (New York: William Morrow, 1976), 145, whose
judgment is that antebellum cookbooks reflect considerable skill and a
willingness to experiment with flavors, "even exotic ones."
27. See Hess and Hess, The Taste of America, and also William
Weaver's introduction to Elizabeth Ellicott Lea, A Quaker Woman's
Cookbook, William Woys Weaver, ed. (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 1982).
28. Eliza Leslie, The Lady's Receipt Book (Philadelphia: Carey and
230 NOTES
Hart, 1847). I used the cookbook collection at the Schlesinger Library

at Radcliffe College.
29. Mary Randolph, The Virginia Housewife or Methodical Cook
(Baltimore: Plaskitt, File, 1838).
30. The Housekeeper's Book (Philadelphia: William Marshall, 1838).
31. Lea, A Quaker Woman's Cookbook, 111—25.
32. Ibid., 61. I have also been influenced in this judgment by conver-
sations with Joseph Carlin of the Culinary Historians of Boston. Not
only is Mr. Carlin a nutritionist, but he has his own extensive collection
of antebellum cookbooks, which he graciously allowed me to consult.
33. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida
County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1981), 198.
34. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks (New York: Viking,
1982), 1209.
35. Elizabeth Wetherell [Susan Warner], The Wide, Wide World
(New York: G. P. Putnam, 1853), 12,5.
36. Ibid., i 5 6f.
37. Ibid., i7of.
38. See the discussion of this work in Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction:
A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), 143-50.
39. Susan Swan, Plain and Fancy: American Women and Their Nee-
dlework, 1700-1850 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977),
204.
40. On this subject see Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The
"Weaker Sex" in Seventeenth-Century New England (Urbana: Univ.
of Illinois Press, 1980).
41. William G. McLoughlin, The American Evangelicals, 1800-
1900, an anthology (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), introduction
passim. For the quote about Lyman Beecher see George M. Fredrickson,
"A Founding Family," New York Review of Books 45 (Nov. 9, 1978),
38. For a different interpretation of the relationship between nineteenth
century and domesticity, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of Ameri-
can Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).
42. Barbara M. Cross, Horace Bushnell: Minister to a Changing
America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), 61-63. See also
David P. Handlin, The American Home: Architecture and Society,
NOTES 231
1815-1915 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 6-n for a discussion of the

impact of Bushnell and "home religion" on American architecture.
43. Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture (New York: Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons, 1890), igf.
44. Ibid,, 406.
45. Steven Mintz, A Prison of Expectations: The Family in Victorian
Culture (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1983), 146.
46. Henry Ward Beecher, Norwood or Village Life in New England
(New York: Fords, Howard and Hulbert, 1887), 12.
47. Ibid., 72.
48. As quoted in Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The
Colonial Experience, 1607—1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970),
486-89.
49. See Russell Elaine Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation,
1776-1830 (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 221-27.
50. Theodore Parker, "Phases of Domestic Life," Lessons from the
World of Matter, vol. 5 of the Works of Theodore Parker (Boston:
American Unitarian Association, 1908), 187-98.
51. Kerber, Women of the Republic, chapter 7 passim; Anne Firor
Scott, "What, Then, Is the American: This New Woman?" Journal of
American History 65 (Dec. 1978): 679-703.
52. Benjamin Rush, "Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Repub-
lic," The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, Dagobert D. Runes, ed.
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 9jf.
53. Degler, At Odds, 308-9. This statistic applies to whites only.
54. Nathaniel Hawthorne referred to his female competition as "that
damned mob of scribbling women" and most scholars have taken their cue
from Hawthorne. See, for example, Henry Nash Smith, "The Scribbling
Women and the Cosmic Success Story," Critical Inquiry i (1974): 47—
70. In The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas uses these
novels as evidence of the effeteness of Victorian culture in the United
States. On the other hand, Helen Waite Papashvily sees the strength of
the novels but views this characteristic as unfortunate evidence of man-
hating on the part of the novelists. See Papashvily, All the Happy End-
ings: A Study of the Domestic Novel in America, the Women Who
Wrote It, the Women Who Read It, in the Nineteenth Century (New
York: Harper & Row, 1956).
55. Baym, Woman's Fiction; Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public
232 NOTES
Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York:

Oxford Univ. Press, 1984); Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The
Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790—1860 (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1985).
56. Frances [Mrs. William] Parkes, Domestic Duties or Instructions
to Young Married Ladies (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1829), 48f. I
am not certain how widely read Mrs. Parkes's book might have been, but
I did come across a mention of a later edition in Godey's.
57. Ibid., 161.
58. Kirk Jeffrey, "Marriage, Career, and Feminine Ideology in Nine-
teenth-Century America: Reconstructing the Marital Experience of
Lydia Maria Child, 1828-1874," Feminist Studies 2 (1975): 113-30.
59. The Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child, 1817-
1880, #758, Aug. 31, 1849, copyright by Patricia J. Holland and Milton
Meltzer, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.
60. Ibid., #48, June 23, 1831.
61. Ibid., Letter to Henrietta Sargent, #1614, Jan. 8, 1865.
62. Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife, I2th ed.
(Boston: Carter, Hendee, 1833), 81.
63. Ibid., 71.
64. Ibid., 5.
65. Ibid., 96.
66. Catharine Sedgwick, Home (Boston and Cambridge: James Mun-
roe, 1835), 28f. Mary Kelley points out that Home went through twelve
editions in two years. Private Woman, Public Stage, 13.
67. Sedgwick, Home, 64.
68. Lydia Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies (Hartford: P. Canfield,
1833), 2,7-
69. Lydia Sigoumey, Letters to Mothers, 6th ed. (New York: Harper
& Brothers, 1841), 192.
70. Ibid., 12.
71. Ibid., 59.
72. Ibid., 195.
73. William A. Alcott, The Young Husband or Duties of Man in the
Marriage Relation (Boston: George W. Light, 1839), I53f. See the
discussion of Alcott in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Learning How To Behave:
A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books (New York: Macmillan,
1946).
NOTES 233
74. Timothy Shay Arthur, Advice to Young Men on Their Duties

and Conduct in Lifee (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1850), 96?.
75. lbid.,99.
76. Henry Clarke Wright, Marriage and Parentage: or, The Repro-
ductive Element in Man, as a Means to His Elevation and Happiness
(Boston: Bela Marsh, 1866), 296. See also Wright, The Empire of the
Mother over the Character and Destiny of the Race (Boston: Bela Marsh,
1863), and Lewis Perry, Childhood, Marriage and Reform: Henry Clarke
Wright, 1797-1870 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980). For the
discussion of a counter-tradition among men, one that celebrated male
freedom from restraint, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Davy Crockett
as Trickster: Pornography, Liminality, and Symbolic Inversion in Vic-
torian America," in Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of
Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985).
77. Daniel Scott Smith, "Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Do-
mestic Feminism in Victorian America," in Clio's Consciousness Raised,
Mary Hartman and Lois W. Banner, eds. (New York: Harper & Row,
1974); Degler, At Odds, 189.
78. Nancy F. Cott, "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian
Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850," Signs 4 (Winter 1978): 2,19-36. See
Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, for a community study depicting the
interplay between domestic ideals and the changing dynamics of family
life.
79. Claudia L. Bushman, "A Good Poor Man's Wife": Being a
Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and Her Family in Nineteenth-
Century New England (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England,
1981), I2of. See chapter 7, "Housekeeping," for a detailed description of
Robinson's routine.
80. Ibid., 121.
81. Mary Kelley, "At War with Herself: Harriet Beecher Stowe as
Woman in Conflict within the Home," American Studies 19 (Fall
1978): 23-40; the quote from Stowe is taken from Forrest Wilson,
Crusader in Crinoline (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1941), 2i9f. For
a description of the water cure see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine
Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W. W. Norton,
1973). 205-9.
82. Annie Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Hough-
ton, Mifflin, 1897), 98.
234 NOTES
83. Eunice Beecher, All Around the House; or How to Make Homes
Happyy (New York: D. Appleton, 1879). For a discussion of Eunice
Beecher's health see Clifford E. Clark, Jr., Henry Ward Beecher: Spokes-
man for a Middle-Class America (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1978).
84. Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (Boston:
Marsh, Capen, Lyon, and Webb, 1841), 18, 19.
85. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 204.
86. See Dudden, Serving Women, on the difficulty of life for most
domestics.
87. Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and
Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York: W. W. Norton,
1984), 24, 40-46.
88. See Mary Patricia Ryan, "American Society and the Cult of Do-
mesticity, 1830-1860," Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of California at Santa
Barbara, 1971, for information on the social origins of the authors of the
advice manuals.
89. Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies, 27 (emphasis added).
90. See Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women (New York: Hill & Wang,
1
979)> ant^ Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail, for a dis-
cussion of this theme.
91. Clinton, The Plantation Mistress, 137.
TWOO The Golden Age of Domesticity

1. On women's culture in the nineteenth century, see Ellen DuBois,
Mari-Jo Buhle, Temma Kaplan, Gerda Lerner, and Carroll Smith-
Rosenberg, "Politics and Culture in Women's History: A Symposium,"
Feminist Studies 6 (Spring 1980): 26-64. This symposium features a
sharp disagreement between those who fear that overstressing women's
culture may result in the neglect of politics (DuBois is the spokesperson
for this point of view) and those who emphasize the positive impact of
women's culture on women's lives in the nineteenth century (Smith-
Rosenberg is the spokesperson for this point of view). For a discussion of
the interplay between women's culture and politics that suggests that the
former may have promoted women's involvement in the latter, see Paula
Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political
Society, 1780-1920," American Historical Review 89 (June 1984):
620-47.
2. Kirk Jeffrey, "Family History: The Middle-Class American Family
NOTES 235
in the Urban Context, 1830-1870," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,

Stanford Univ., 1972, p. 99.
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Domestic Life," Emerson's Complete
Works, VII (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 113.
4. Ibid., 113.
5. Anne C. Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-
1850 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), 100.
6. Emerson, "Domestic Life," i o8f.
7. Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers, New York Public Library, Box i.
8. Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Emerson, Delores Bird
Carpenter, ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 96f.
9. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (New
York: Bantam, 1981).
10. Ibid., 53.
11. Ibid., 200.
12. As quoted in Clifford E. Clark, Jr., "Domestic Architecture as
an Index to Social History: The Romantic Revival and the Cult of Do-
mesticity in America, 1840—1870," Journal of Interdisciplinary History
7 (Summer 1976): 33-56, p. 56.
13. On the moral significance of architecture in England and the
United States under the influence of John Ruskin, see David Handlin,
The American Home: Architecture and Society, 1815-1915 (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1979), 41.
14. Andrew Jackson Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses,
with introduction by J. Stewart Johnson (New York: Dover, 1969), 79.
The sales figures are in the introduction to this edition.
15. Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of
Housing in America (New York: Pantheon, 1981)7 84.
16. Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity
in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984),
27.
17. Henry Clay to Sarah Josepha Hale, March 6, 1848, Hale Papers,
Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.
18. Oliver Wendell Holmes to Sarah Josepha Hale, Nov. 20, 1872,
Hale Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.
19. See Hearth and Home, Oct. 30, 1869, for the article on coopera-
tive housekeeping. See the issue of Aug. 7, 1869, for Stowe's reply to
Horace Bushnell.
20. See the splendid biography of Beecher by Kathryn Kish Sklar,
236 NOTES
Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York:

W. W. Norton, 1976).
21. See also Susan Hill Lindley, "Woman's Profession in the Life
and Thought of Catharine Beecher: A Study of Religion and Reform,"
unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Duke Univ., 1974.
22. Anne Firor Scott, "The Ever-Widening Circle: The Diffusion of
Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822-72," History of
Education Quarterly 19 (Spring 1979): 3-25. On the radicalism of
suffrage see Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family from the
Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), and
Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Inde-
pendent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1978).
23. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 161.
24. Catharine E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the
Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (Boston: Marsh, Capen,
Lyon, and Webb, 1841), 9.
25. Catharine E. Beecher, The True Remedy for the Wrongs of
Woman with a History of an Enter-prise Having That for Its Object
(Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1851), 51.
26. Ibid., 59.
27. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, 314.
28. Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American
Woman's Home (New York: J. B. Ford, 1870), 19.
29. Harriet Beecher Stowe to Sarah Josepha Hale, undated but ca.
1850, Hale Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.
30. Mrs. Edward Beecher to Stowe as quoted in Forrest Wilson,
Crusader in Crinoline (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1941), 252.
31. As quoted in Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Kenneth
S. Lynn, ed., The John Harvard Library, Howard Mumford Jones,
editor-in-chief (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1962), xxvi.
32. Harriet Beecher Stowe to Lord . . . , Jan. 20, 1853, Hunting-
ton Library, San Marino, Calif.
33. Jane Tompkins, "Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and
the Politics of Literary History," Glyph 8 (1981): 79-102, p. 81.
34. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing (New York:
Viking, 1982), 527, 561, 560.
35. Mary Virginia Terhune, Marion Harland's Autobiography: The
Story of a Long Lifee (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910), 339.
NOTES 237
36. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York: New
American Library, 1966), 156.
37. Ibid.
38. Alice C. Crozier, The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), 167-77.
39. Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 224$.
40. On the home of Simon Legree as an "anti-home" see the pioneer-
ing discussion in William Robert Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old
South and American National Character (New York: G. Braziller,
1961).
41. These articles are reprinted in Harriet Beecher Stowe, Household
Papers and Stories, vol. 8 of The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe
(Cambridge: Hough ton Mifflin, 1896).
42. Annie Fields, "Days with Mrs. Stowe," Atlantic Monthly (Aug.
1896), as reprinted in Elizabeth Ammons, ed., Critical Essays on Harriet
Beecher Stowe (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 292.
43. On Stowe's conservative turn in her later life see Dorothy Berkson,
"Millennial Politics and the Feminine Fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe,"
in Ammons, Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe.
44. Annie Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1897), 210, 211.
45. Theodore Parker, "Home Considered in Relation to Its Moral In-
fluence," Sins and Safeguards of Society, vol. 9 in The Works of Theo-
dore Parker (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1908), 214; "The
Public Function of Women," in Sins and Safeguards of Society, ibid.,
204, 205.
46. Parker, "Home Considered in Relation to Its Moral Influence,"
213-
47. Parker was, for example, one of the "Secret Six" who advanced
help to John Brown prior to the raid on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry in
1859.
48. On Blackwell see Elizabeth Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell:
A Biography (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1983); Blanche
Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America
(Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1978); William Leach, True Love and
Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York:
Basic Books, 1980).
49. Blackwell to Lucy Stone, 1850, Blackwell Family Papers, Library
of Congress, Container 92.
238 NOTES
50. Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 162, 199.

51. Blackwell to Susan B. Anthony, Oct. 25, 1859, Blackwell Family
Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Reel 2, Folder 34.
52. Blackwell to Lucy Stone, April 1859, Blackwell Family Papers,
Library of Congress, Container 92.
53. Blackwell to Lucy Stone, Dec. 9, 1879, Blackwell Family Papers,
Library of Congress, Container 92.
54. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, "The Relation of Woman's Work
in the Household to the Work Outside," Papers and Letters Presented at
the First Woman's Congress of the Association for the Advancement of
Women . . . New York, October, 1873, as quoted in Cazden, An-
te inette Brown Blackwell, 163.
55. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, The Sexes Throughout Nature
(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1875), 112.
56. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, "Work in Relation to the Home,"
Woman's Journal, May 2, 1874.
57. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, "Work in Relation to the Home,
Part II," Woman's Journal, May 9, 1874.
58. Samuel J. May, "The Rights and Condition of Women; Consid-
ered in "The Church of the Messiah,'" Nov. 8, 1846 (Syracuse: Stod-
dard and Babcock), collection of the Boston Public Library.
59. Letter from Samuel May to Woman's Rights Convention, Worces-
ter, Mass., Oct. 1850, reprinted in Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
Woman's Rights Tracts no. 8, collection of the Boston Atheneum.
60. Memoir of Samuel Joseph May (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873),
277.
61. Mary Beth Norton, "The Evolution of White Women's Expe-
rience in Early America," American Historical Review 89 (June 1984):
593-619, 6i5f. See also Donald G. Mathews, "The Second Great Awak-
ening as an Organizing Process, 1780-1830: An Hypothesis," American
Quarterly 21 (Spring 1969): 23-42; Nancy F. Cott, "Young Women
in the Second Great Awakening in New England," Feminist Studies 3
(Fall 1975): 17-29-
62. As quoted in Anne Firor Scott, "Women's Voluntary Associations
in the Forming of American Society," in Scott, Making the Invisible
Woman Visible (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1984), 280.
63. Norton, "The Evolution of White Women's Experience in Early
America," 617. Norton points out that the American situation whereby
women took this responsibility was unique. On the role of voluntary
NOTES 239
associations in a frontier community see Don Harrison Doyle, The Social

Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-1870 (Ur-
bana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1978).
64. Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and
Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York: W. W. Norton,
1984), 205.
65. Mary P. Ryan, "The Power of Women's Networks," Feminist
Studies 6 (Spring 1979): 66-85, PP- 68f.
66. Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics," 625.
67. Virginia Sapiro, The Political Integration of Women (Urbana:
Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983).
THREE Domestic Feminism and the World Outside the Home

1. See Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence
of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1978).
2. For this definition of domestic feminism see Karen J. Blair, The
Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868—1914
(New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980), 8.
3. See Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domes-
ticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1984).
4. Elizabeth Wetherell [Susan Warner], The Wide, Wide World
(New York: G. P. Putnam, 1853), vol. II, p. 54.
5. Ibid., 86.
6. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Homekeeping Versus Housekeeping,"
Household Papers and Stories, vol. VIII in The Writings of Harriet
Beecher Stowe (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), 27.
7. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida
County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1981), 232.
8. In fact, Nina Baym read fourteen of Southworth's novels from the
18505 and "found only one thoroughly good man, the father in The
Lost Heiress. Most are of limited intelligence and overwhelming vanity."
Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in
America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), 115.
9. E. D. E. N. Southworth, The Deserted Wife fe (New York: D. Ap-
pleton, 1850), 78.
240 NOTES
10. Ibid., 143.

11. Says Nina Baym, "Southworth's women want to make a place for
themselves where men can be distanced and controlled." Baym, Woman's
Fiction, 116.
12. Augusta J. Evans, St. Elmo (New York: Carleton, 1866), 467^
Southworth, on the other hand, supported suffrage. See the Aug. 13,
1868, issue of The Revolution for a letter memorializing Congress on
hehalf of suffrage for women in the nation's capital. Southworth signed
the letter.
13. See the discussion of Evans in Baym, Woman's Fiction, chapter
i o passim.
14. Godey's 47 (July 1853), 84^
15. Sarah Josepha Hale, Manners or Happy Ho-mes and Good Society
All the Year Round (Boston: J. E. Tilton, 1868), 2of.
16. Ibid., 74f.
17. Mary H. Grant, "Domestic Experience and Feminist Theory: The
Case of Julia Ward Howe," Woman's Being, Woman's Place, Mary
Kelley, ed. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), 2,24.
18. Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, 1819-1899 (Boston: Hough-
ton MifHin, 1900), 213-15.
19. As quoted in Deborah Pickman Clifford, Mine Eyes Have Seen
the Glory (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 197. By no means am I trying
to suggest that the Howes' marriage was typical of either those of re-
formers or of the larger society. I am merely trying to suggest the possi-
bility of a sexual politics using domesticity as the chief terrain of battle.
Indeed, Blanche Glassman Hersh argues convincingly that the Howes
were atypical of reformers, most of whom had harmonious marriages. See
Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist Abolitionists in America (Urbana:
Univ. of Illinois Press, 1978).
20. Howe, Reminiscences, 2i6f.
21. See DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 189-200.
22. See Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women,
Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middle-
town, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1981), for insights into antagonis-
tic male and female cultures in the late nineteenth century. In my view,
however, Epstein fails to grasp the full value of domesticity for women.
23. The account of Twain's life is based on the following: Justin
Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1966); Everett Emerson, The Authentic Mark Twain: A
NOTES 241
Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens (Philadelphia: Univ. of Penn-

sylvania Press, 1984); Susan K. Harris, Mark Twain's Escape from
Time: A Study of Patterns and Images (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri
Press, 1982). This particular episode is related by Michael Patrick Hearn
in his introduction to Huckleberry Finn (New York: Clarkson N. Potter,
1981).
24. Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, 80.
25. As quoted in ibid., 115.
26. Nook Farm in Hartford was also the home of Harriet Beecher
Stowe.
27. Harris, Mark Twain's Escape from Time, 116.
28. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 1982), n.
29. Ibid., 48.
30. Ibid., 199.
31. Ibid., 161, 162.
32. Ibid., 255.
33. As quoted in Hearn's introduction to Huckleberry Finn, 28.
34. Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables,
Stools and Candlesticks (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1878).
35. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 165, 171.
36. Ibid., 176, 183.
37. As quoted in Emerson, The Authentic Mark Twain, 128.
38. Harris, Mark Twain's Escape from Time, 58f.
39. Hearn, introduction to Huckleberry Finn, 35.
40. Benjamin P. Shillaber, Life and Sayings of Mrs. Partington (New
York: J. C. Derby, 1854). The relationship between Mrs. Partington
and Ike was evidently one source of inspiration for the relationship be-
tween Aunt Polly and Tom Sawyer.
41. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, "The Story of a Bad Boy," in Our Young
Folks: An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls V (May 1869), 277.
42. Benjamin P. Shillaber, Ike Partington; or, The Adventures of a
Human Boy and His Friends (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1879), lof.
43. George William Peck, The Grocery Man and Peck's Bad Boy
(Chicago and New York: Belford, Clarke, 1883), 26.
44. Louisa May Alcott, Little Men (Cleveland and New York: World
Publishing, 1950), 129.
45. I was unable to secure a copy of Reveries of a Bachelor. I did,
however, peruse Fudge Doings: Being Tony Fudge's Record of the Same,
2^2 NOTES
2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1855), where I encountered the

following passage (p. 29) in which Tony Fudge explains his marital
condition:
I am married—only to the world; which I find to be an agreeable
spouse something fat, and with streaks of ill-temper; but, upon the
whole, as good-natured and yielding as a moderate man ought to ex-
pect.
46. The extent to which Social Darwinism entered into American
thought and life is still subject to scholarly debate. The classic treatment
is Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed.
(Boston: Beacon, 1955). A recent critic is Robert C. Bannister, Social
Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Thought (Philadel-
phia: Temple Univ. Press, 1979).
47. On the cult of the strenuous life see George Fredrickson, The
Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union
(New York: Harper & Row, 1965), chapter n; on Theodore Roosevelt
see Kathleen Dalton, "Why America Loved Teddy Roosevelt or, Cha-
risma Is in the Eyes of the Beholders," Psychohistory Review 8 (Winter
1979): 16-26; on definitions of masculinity in the 18905 see Peter
Gabriel Filene, Him/Her/Self: f: Sex Roles in Modern America (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), chapter 3. A pathbreaking
article by John Higham published more than twenty years ago identified
the heightened interest in virility in the 18905, adducing the popularity
of writers like Owen Wister and Jack London as evidence:
In effect, these and other writers were answering James Lane Allen's
plea of 1897 f°r a reassertion of the masculine principle of virility
and instinctive action in a literature too much dominated by the
feminine principle of refinement and delicacy.
Higham, "The Reorientation of American Culture in the 18905," in The
Origins of Modern Consciousness, John Weiss, ed. (Detroit: Wayne
State Univ. Press, 1965), 30.
48. Letter from Miss M. C. W. Dawson to Frances Willard, Dec. 14,
1874, Temperance and Prohibition Papers, Harvard Univ. Library,
Reel i i .
49. Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power
and Liberty, 1873-1900 (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1981), 22.
50. Mark Twain, "The Temperance Crusade and Woman's Rights,"
The Works of Mark Twain: Europe and Elsewhere XXIX (New York:
Gabriel Wells, 1923), 24-30.
NOTES 243
51. Says Ruth Bordin, the most recent student of the WCTU, "The
Woman's Christian Temperance Union was unquestionably the first
mass movement of American women." Bordin, Woman and Temperance,
156.
52. Twain, "The Temperance Crusade and Women's Rights," 29.
53. As quoted in Mari-Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism,
1870-1920 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1981), 65.
54. Timothy Shay Arthur, Woman to the Rescue: A Story of the
New Crusade (Philadelphia: J. M. Stoddart, 1874), 2i8f.
55. Theodore Parker, "The Public Function of Women," Sins and
Safeguards of Society, vol. 9 of The Works of Theodore Parker (Boston:
American Unitarian Association, 1908), 200.
56. The Woman's Journal was the official publication of the American
Woman's Suffrage Association, founded by Lucy Stone, Henry Ward
Beecher, and others. AWSA, unlike NWSA, accepted the Reconstruc-
tion amendment that gave black men the vote.
57. Woman's Journal, Jan. 8, 1881.
58. Woman's Journal, Nov. 25, 1911.
59. Marion Talbot and Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, The Modern
Household (Boston: Whitcomb and Barrows, 1912), 86.
60. Jane Addams, "Why Women Should Vote," Ladies Home Journal
(Jan. 1910), 21.
61. On this subject see Marjorie Julian Spruill, "Sex, Science, and the
'Woman Question': The Woman's Journal on Woman's Nature and
Potential," unpublished M.A. thesis, Univ. of Virginia, 1980.
62. Blackwell Family Papers, Library of Congress, Container 85.
FOUR Toward an Industrialized Home

i. See Mary Beth Norton, "The Evolution of White Women's Ex-
perience in Early America," American Historical Review 89 (June
1984): 593-619. Says Norton, "The image of the republican mother
represented a successful fusing of contradictory collective and individual-
istic tendencies within republican ideology itself, tendencies that quickly
proved irreconcilable with respect to men. On the one hand, republican-
ism looked to the past and preached the necessary sacrifice of the individ-
ual will to the good of the whole. On the other, it looked to the future
and sang the praises of unencumbered individualism. . . . both aspects
could be incorporated into the definition of a woman's role as mother"
244 NOTES
(p. 617). On republicanism see John Thomas, Alternative America:

Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the Adver-
sary Tradition (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press,
1983), chapter i; on artisanal republicanism, see Sean Wilentz, Chants
Democratic (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984); on late-nineteenth-
century malaise see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodern-
ism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920 (New
York: Pantheon, 1981).
2. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (New York:
Modern Library, 1951), io4f.
3. On housework reform, see Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic
Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neigh-
borhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).
4. Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nine-
teenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press,
1983)-
5. Ibid., chapter 4.
6. Lucy Maynard Salmon, Domestic Service, and ed. (New York:
Macmillan, 1901), 57, 54. It seems likely that the older pattern survived
in rural areas until well into the twentieth century. For example, my
father Glen Ingles recalls "standing up" for a hired girl at her wedding
in the rural South Dakota of the teens.
7. Anna Smith to HBS, Summer 1839, Beecher Stowe Collection,
Radcliffe Women's Archives, Schlesinger Library, Folder 236.
8. Catharine Sedgwick, Home (Boston and Cambridge: James Mun-
roe, 1835), 72. Dudden discusses this character, too. See Dudden, Serv-
ing Women, 23.
9. Daniel E. Sutherland, Americans and Their Servants: Domestic
Service in the United States from 1800 to 1920 (Baton Rouge: Loui-
siana State Univ. Press, 1981), 33.
10. David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic
Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1978), 33-
11. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "The Lady Who Does Her Own Work,"
Household Papers and Stories, vol. VIII in The Writings of Harriet
Beecher Stowe (Cambridge: Houghton MifBin, 1896), 94.
12. Mrs. Horace Mann, "Co-operative Housekeeping," Hearth and
Home (Oct. 30, 1869).
13. Zena Peirce to Frances Willard, Aug. 1877, Elizabeth Boynton
NOTES 245
Harbert Collection, Huntington Library, Box 8, Folder 123. See Dolores

Hayden's discussion of Peirce in The Grand Domestic Revolution, chap-
ter 4.
14. Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution, 117; Parker Pillsbury,
"Cooperative Housekeeping," The Revolution (July 29, 1869); M. F.
Peirce, "Co-operation," Papers of the 4th Congress of Women, October
1876 (Washington, D.C.: Todd Brothers, 1877); Godey's (Oct. 1869).
Hayden provides a list of the cooperative ventures in her appendix.
15. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "A Model Village," The Revolution
(April 2, 1868).
16. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Servants," Household Papers and Stories,
I52f.
17. "Veni Vidi," Hearth and Home (July 18, 1874).
18. Abby Morton Diaz, A Domestic Problem: Work and Culture in
the Household (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1875), i if.
19. Edward Bellamy, "A Vital Domestic Problem," Good Housekeep-
ing (Dec. 21, 1889).
20. Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution, 3.
21. Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American
Woman's Home (New York: J. B. Ford, 1870), 74; Report of the Com-
mittee on Awards of the World's Columbian Commission: Special Reports
upon Special Subjects or Groups, vol. I (Washington: Government
Printing Office, 1901), 849.
22. The two standard works on the technology of housework are Ruth
Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household
Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic
Books, 1983), and Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American
Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982). Both have much to offer al-
though Cowan has to strain occasionally to make all the evidence fit her
thesis that the industrialization of the home has had only—or largely—the
effect of creating more work for the housewife.
23. Sandra L. Myres, ed., Ho for California: Women's Overland
Diaries from the Huntington Library (San Marino: Huntington Library,
1980), 18, 100.
24. Lydia Maria Child to Louisa Loring, Dec. 12, 1840, #219 in the
Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child, 1817—1880, copyright
by Patricia J. Holland and Milton Meltzer, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe
College.
25. Godey's (July 1860).
246 NOTES
26. World's Columbian Commission Report, vol. II, p. 1405.

27. Annie Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1897), 35f.
28. World's Columbian Commission Report, vol. II, p. 1371.
29. Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Smithsonian Institu-
tion. The circular is a fascinating document with respect to racial, ethnic,
and class stereotypes. The Irish and black maids are depicted in highly
similar stances with similarly coarse features while the middle-class
women who are supposed to be their employers are depicted with delicate
features and refined manners.
30. Strasser, Never Done, 73. See also Siegfried Giedion, Mechaniza-
tion Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955), 544.
31. Woman's Journal (Nov. 14, 1891).
32. Mary Beals Vail, "Approved Methods for Home Laundering,"
(Cincinnati: Proctor and Gamble, 1906), Warshaw Collection of Busi-
ness Americana, Smithsonian Institution.
33. Alfred D. Chandler, "The Beginnings of 'Big Business" in Ameri-
can History," Business History Review 33 (Spring 1959), reprinted in
Pivotal Interpretations of American History, vol. II, Carl N. Degler, ed.
(New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
34. "Adventures of Del Monte," Fortune 18 (Nov. 1938), 77.
35. John L. Hess and Karen Hess, The Taste of America (New York:
Grossman, 1977), 96; see also William Weaver's introduction to Eliza-
beth Ellicott Lea, A Quaker Woman's Cookbook, edited with an intro-
duction by William Woys Weaver (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania
Press, 1982), Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont, Eating in
America: A History (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1976),
145, and Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the
Turn of the Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).
36. Introduction to Mary Randolph, The Virginia Housewife, a fac-
simile of the ist ed., 1824, with historical notes and commentaries by
Karen Hess (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1984).
37. Hearth and Home (March 27, 1869).
38. Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about
Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978),
296.
39. Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Thomas A. Gulla-
son, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 9.
NOTES 247
40. Ibid., 11.

41. On the centrality of Norwood, see William McLoughlin, The
Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on the Shifting Values of
Mid-Victorian America, 1840-1870 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1970), 56, 82-90.
42. Charles M. Sheldon, In His Steps (Chicago: John C. Winston,
1937). 249-
43. Ibid., 127.
44. Ibid., 204.
45. Washington Gladden, Applied Christianity: Moral Aspects of
Social Questions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), 187-97.
46. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New
York: Macmillan, 1910), 279.
47. Julia McNair Wright, The Complete Home (Philadelphia: J. C.
McCurdy, 1879), 176-80.
48. The classic study is Joann Vanek, "Keeping Busy: Time Spent in
Housework, United States, 1920-1970," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
Univ. of Michigan, 1973. See also Cowan, More Work for Mother.
49. Cowan, More Work for Mother, 85.
50. John Thomas refers to the Leete household as "affectless" and
points to the lack of emotional communion there: "The household is
harmonious because passion has been banished." Thomas, Alternative
America, 255. On the relation between the need for emotional intimacy
and capitalism, see Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism and Family Life (New York:
Harper and Row, 1976), and Zaretsky, "The Place of the Family in the
Origins of the Welfare State," in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist
Questions, Barrie Thome, ed., with Marilyn Yalom (New York: Long-
man, 1982). To acknowledge the human need for intimacy is not to
accede to a Parsonian approach that would make women largely respon-
sible for maintaining the life of the emotions.
51. Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution, 299.
FIVE Darwinism and Domesticity

1. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 2d
ed., rev. (Boston: Beacon, 1955).
2. On Darwinism in the United States, see Robert C. Bannister, Social
Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Phila-
delphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1979), and Cynthia Eagle Russet, Darwin
248 NOTES
in America: The Intellectual Response 1865-1912 (San Francisco:

W. H. Freeman, 1976). On Darwin and women, see Ruth Bleier,
Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories of Women
(New York: Pergamon, 1984), Ruth Hubbard, "Have Only Men
Evolved?," in Women Look at Biology Looking at Women: A Collection
of Feminist Critiques, Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifin, and Barbara
Fried, eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1979), and Rosalind Rosen-
berg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982).
3. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Nat-
ural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 51.
4. As quoted in Peter Brent, Charles Darwin: "A Man of Enlarged
Curiosity" (London: Heinemann, 1981), 247.
5. Ibid.
6. Donald Fleming, "Charles Darwin, the Anaesthetic Man," Darwin,
Philip Appleman, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970). Fleming
quotes not only from Darwin's journal but also from Charles Dickens's
novel, Hard Times. In this novel Dickens depicts the emotional wreckage
created by the efforts of Thomas Gradgrind to eliminate poetry and other
such foolishness from the experience of his children. Says Fleming, "In
his resolve to be one of the great Truth-Bearers, Darwin strove to perfect
himself as a fact-and-dust man, more abundant in learning and insight,
more generous in spirit, and more divided than Thomas Gradgrind, but
endeavoring to stand for the same thing and indeed opening out cosmic
vistas for application of the Gradgrind philosophy." Fleming, "Charles
Darwin," 586.
7. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man; and Selection in Relation to
Sex (New York: A. L. Burt, 1874), 643.
8. Ibid., 643, 644.
9. Ibid., 645.
10. Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (New York: D. Apple-
ton, 1875), 373, 374. See the discussion of this topic in Rosenberg,
Beyond Separate Spheres, chapter i passim.
n. Ibid., 375.
12. George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind (New
York: Harper & Row, 1971), 235. See also Stephen Jay Gould, The
Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981) for a discussion
of the pseudoscientific attempts to "measure" the brains of women and
less favored races in the late nineteenth century.
NOTES 249
13. Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory," Science and
Creationism, Ashley Montagu, ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1984).
14. Hubbard, "Have Only Men Evolved?," 31. One could argue that
sexual selection gave females the dignified role of choosing mates, but
neither Darwin nor Spencer seems to have made much of this.
15. Edward J. Pfeifer, "United States," The Comparative Reception
of Darwinism, Thomas F. Click, ed. (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press,
i974)> 194-96-
16. Ibid., 198, 199.
17. Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American
Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), 3.
18. Rosenberg argues that Darwinism has convinced educated minds
with such ease that the opposition to it has been class and regional in
origin. Ibid.
19. Russet, Darwin in America, 67.
20. As quoted in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg,
"The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Women," No
Other Gods, 55. See also Lester Frank Ward, "Our Better Halves," The
Forum 6 (Nov. 1888): 266-75. Ward was reacting to a rash of articles
that had employed biology to keep women in their place.
21. Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the
Girls (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873), 39. See also the discussion of
Dr. Clarke in Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, chapter i.
22. Julia Ward Howe, Sex and Education: A Reply to Dr. E. H.
Clarke's "Sex in Education" (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874), 19.
23. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, "Sex and Evolution," The Feminist
Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir, Alice S, Rossi, ed. (New York: Co-
lumbia Univ. Press, 1973), 357.
24. Ibid., 367.
25. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, The Sexes Throughout Nature
(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1875), 135.
26. On Blackwell, see Rosalind Rosenberg, "In Search of Woman's
Nature," Feminist Studies 3 (Fall 1975): 141-54. See also Elizabeth
Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell: A Biography (Old Westbury,
N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1983), and William Leach, True Love and Perfect
Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York: Basic
Books, 1980).
27. Bleier, Science and Gender, 22.
25° NOTES
28. Gould, The Panda's Thumb, 83.

29. Hubbard, "Have Only Men Evolved?," 26.
30. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 81.
31. Lester Frank Ward, Dynamic Sociology, vol. I (New York: D.
Appleton, 1898), 648.
32. Ward, Dynamic Sociology, vol. II, p. 437f.
33. See Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and
American Political Society, 1780-1920," American Historical Review 89
(June 1984): 620-37 for an article arguing that women's voluntary
associations were so pervasive and important that they were responsible
for the existence of a female political culture in the nineteenth century.
34. Ward, Dynamic Sociology, vol. II, p. 616.
35. Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York:
Harper & Row, 1975), 31.
36. Ibid., 89.
37. Ibid., 187.
38. Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper," The Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Reader, Ann Lane, ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
39. Carl Degler, "Charlotte Perkins Gilman," Notable American
Women, 1607-1950, 3 vols., Edward James, Janet James, and Paul S.
Boyer, eds. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1971),
II, pp. 39-42.
40. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(London: J. Johnson, 1792), 402.
41. Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolition-
ists in America (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1978), 235.
42. Ibid., 93.
43. Woman's Journal, March 12, 1898.
44. As quoted in Elizabeth Griffith, "Elizabeth Cady Stanton on
Marriage and Divorce: Feminist Theory and Domestic Experience,"
Woman's Being, Woman's Place, Mary Kelley, ed. (Boston: G. K. Hall,
1979), 24°> 24'-
45. The Revolution, April i, 1869.
46. The Revolution, April 21, 1870.
47. "Homes of Single Women," speech in 1877, Susan B. Anthony
Papers, Library of Congress, Reel 7.
48. Anthony to Merritt Anthony, July 8, 1891, Anthony Papers, Li-
brary of Congress, Reel i.
NOTES 251
49. Letter from Miriam O. Cole, Woman's Journal, Oct. 15, 1870.
50. Leach, True Love and Perfect Union, 198. As we saw in the pre-
ceding chapter, this discussion had ended by the last two decades of the
nineteenth century, perhaps because technology seemed to be promising
an easier solution to the housework problem than reorganizing gender
relations would be, and perhaps also because of the declining interest
taken in the home by intellectuals.
51. Gilman, Women and Economics: The Economic Factor between
Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, Carl N. Degler, ed.
(New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 5.
52. Gilman, The Home: Its Work and Influence (New York: Mc-
Clure, Phillips, 1903), 83.
53. Gilman, Women and Economics, 69, 70, 74.
54. Ibid., 180.
55. Gilman, The Home, 32; Gilman, The Man-Made World or Our
Androcentric Culture, 3 ed. (New York: Charlton, 1914), 64.
56. Gilman, The Home, i35f.
57. For a discussion of the negative implications for women in the
formulation of the culture of professionalism see Joan Jacobs Brumberg
and Nancy Tomes, "Women in the Professions: A Research Agenda for
American Historians," Reviews in American History 10 (June 1982):
275-96, and Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles
and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982),
chapter 4, "A Manly Profession," passim,
58. Catt, "An Eight-Hour Day for the Housewife—Why Not?" Pic-
torial Review (Nov. 1928).
59. For brilliant insights into this dilemma—that is, the chasm between
reason and emotion in the wake of Darwin—see Fleming, "Charles Dar-
win, the Anaesthetic Man."
SIX The Housewife and the Home Economist

i. As quoted in Caroline L. Hunt, The Life of Ellen H. Richards
(Washington, D.C.: American Home Economics Association, 1980), 37.
The account of Ellen Richards's life is also based on the entry on her
by Janet Wilson James in Notable American Women, 1607-1950,
3 vols., Edward James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, eds.
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), III, pp.
2$2 NOTES
143-46, and Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Strug-

gles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press,
1982).
2. Lita Bane, The Story of Isabel Bevier (Peoria, 111.: Chas. A. Ben-
nett, 1955)-
3. Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of
Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), 49.
4. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, 69, 70.
5. Godey's (Jan. 1867); Isabel Bevier and Susannah Usher, The Home
Economics Movement, Part I (Boston: Whitcomb and Barrows, 1912),
chapter i; Emma Seifert Weigley, "It Might Have Been Euthenics: The
Lake Placid Conferences and the Home Economics Movement," Ameri-
can Quarterly 26 (March 1974): 79-96.
6. Hunt, Ellen Richards, 115.
7. Ibid., 108.
8. Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle
Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1976). See also Rossiter, Women Scientists in
America, chapter 4, "A Manly Profession," and Joan Jacobs Brumberg
and Nancy Tomes, "Women in the Professions: A Research Agenda for
American Historians," Reviews in American History 10 (June 1982):
275-96.
9. Henrietta Goodrich, "Standards of Living: Food," Lake Placid Con-
ference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Confer-
ence (Lake Placid, N.Y., 1902), 43.
10. Mrs. Mary L. Wade, "Refined Life on Small Incomes or The
Woman Who Does Her Own Work," Lake Placid Conference on Home
Economics, Proceedings of the First, Second, and Third Annual Confer-
ence (Lake Placid, N.Y., 1901), 97.
11. Mrs. Lewis Kennedy Morse, "Report of Committee on Standards
for Routine Work in the Home," Lake Placid Conference on Home
Economics, Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference (Lake Placid,
N.Y., 1904), 60.
12. Ellen Richards, "Domestic Industries—In or Out—Why Not," Pro-
ceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference, 27-30; "Ten Years of the Lake
Placid Conference on Home Economics: Its History and Aims," Lake
Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the Tenth An-
nual Conference (Lake Placid, N.Y., 1908), igf.
13. This point is made in Marjorie East, Home Economics: Past,
NOTES 253
Present, and Future (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1980), 8-19. Indeed,
East lists at least four frameworks for home economics, all of which
showed up at the Lake Placid conferences: a) management of the house-
hold; b) the application of science towards improving the environment-
human ecology; c) learning by doing a la John Dewey applied to cook-
ing and sewing; d) the education of women for womanhood.
14. The syllabus can be found in the Elizabeth Boynton Harbert Col-
lection, Huntington Library, Box 11, Folder 154. See Mary A. Hill,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860-
1896 (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1980), 242 for information
about Campbell's career.
15. Marion Talbot and Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, The Modern
Household (Boston: Whitcomb and Barrows, 1912), 42f.
16. Ibid., 47.
17. Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in
the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1964), ix.
18. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation
of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1974), chapter 4 passim.
19. Ibid., 102-6.
20. Helen Campbell, Household Economics (New York: G. P. Put-
nam's Sons, 1897), 182, i6f., 141.
21. Ibid., 120, 196, 145^
22. Isabel Bevier, The House: Its Plan, Decoration and Care, vol. I in
The Library of Home Economics (Chicago: American School of Home
Economics, 1907), 163.
23. Martha Bensley Bruere and Robert W. Bruere, Increasing Home
Efficiency (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 177.
24. Ibid., 291.
25. Lillian M. Gilbreth, The Home-Maker and Her Job (New York:
D. Appleton, 1929), chapter 5.
26. Frank B. Gilbreth, Time Out for Happiness (New York: Thomas
Y. Crowell, 1970), i.
27. Paul V. Betters, "The Bureau of Home Economics: Its History,
Activities and Organization," Service Monographs of the United States
Government, No. 62 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1930),
4-6.
28. Ibid., 10.
254 NOTES
29. Ibid., 38.

30. "Women Confer on Plans for New Bureau of Home Economics,"
typescript, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Eco-
nomics, National Archives, R.G. 176, Box 601.
31. Betters, "The Bureau of Home Economics," i.
32. The report on the planning conference is in an untitled type-
script, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics,
R.G. 176, Box 601; E. W. Allen, "Standards for Research in Home Eco-
nomics under the Purnell Act," mimeo, R.G. 176, Box 601.
33. Harbert Collection, Box 11, Folder 154.
34. La Follette Family Papers, Library of Congress, Series B, Con-
tainers 9, 10, u, 12, and 13. For the correspondence between Louise
Stanley and Caroline Hunt, see Records of the Bureau of Human Nutri-
tion and Economics, R.G. 176, Box 601.
35. "Nellie Kedzie Jones's Advice to Farm Women: Letters from
Wisconsin, 1912-1916," Jeanne Hunnicutt Delgado, ed., Wisconsin
Magazine of History (Autumn 1973): 3-27, p. 17.
36. Gilbreth, The Home-Maker and Her Job, 47.
37. One of the best documents for understanding how all these atti-
tudes could coalesce in one person is Jacob Riis, How the Other Half
Lives (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), origi-
nally published in 1890. Riis writes out of outrage over the newcomers'
sufferings but every page demonstrates his distaste for many of their cul-
tural practices.
38. More than one commentator has pointed out that it took Hitler,
Aryan supremacy, and Nazi experimentation to discredit eugenics.
39. Mary Bralove, Wall Street Journal, as quoted in John L. Hess and
Karen Hess, The Taste of America (New York: Grossman, 1977), 5.
40. The work-sheet survives in the papers of the Bureau of Human
Nutrition and Home Economics, National Archives, R.G. 176, Box 601.
The work book is catalogued as the Bertha Davis Sampler, Schlesinger
Library, Radcliffe College.
41. Mary Virginia Terhune, Marion Harland's Autobiography: The
Story of a Long Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910), 84.
42. Ibid., i n .
43. Ibid., 164.
44. Mary Virginia Terhune, The Dinner Year Book (Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons, 1878); Terhune and Christine Terhune Herrick, The Na-
tional Cook Book (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896).
NOTES 255
45. See the discussion of Terhune in Mary Kelley, Private Woman,

Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth Cenutry America
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), and the entry by Merritt Cross
in Notable American Women, 1670-1950, III, pp. 439-41.
46. In later life she lived in Laguna Beach and worked as an interior
decorator where—as a child—I knew her.
47. Christine Frederick, "The New Housekeeping," Ladies Home
Journal (Sept. 1912); Frederick, Household Engineering: Scientific
Management in the Home (Chicago: American School of Home Eco-
nomics, 192,0), 96, chapter 4, p. 211.
48. Christine Frederick, The New Housekeeping: Efficiencycy Studies
in Home Management (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Page, 1913),
i8 9 f.
49. Ibid., 233.
50. Ibid., 46.
51. Ibid., 227.
52. Ibid., 224.
53. Caroline Shillaber, "Christine McGaffey Frederick," Notable
American Women, Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, eds.
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), 249, 250.
54. In her recent book on women and cookery at the turn of the cen-
tury, Laura Shapiro presents arguments very congruent with my own
analysis:
The task faced by home economists was to change the focus of do-
mesticity from the past to the future, demolishing the rule of senti-
ment and establishing in its place the values manifest in American
business and industry. American business, in fact, was eager to em-
brace home economics, and the food industry became a prominent
ally in the assault on mother's cooking.
Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Cen-
tury (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 190.
SEVEN Domesticity and the Culture of Consumption

1. Willa Gather, My Antonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918),
65, 66.
2. Ibid., 337, 338.
3. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920),
256 NOTES
31. It should be noted that Willa Gather, too, dealt with the limitations
of small-town life in some of her other works.
4. Ibid., 85.
5. According to Lewis's biographer, Lewis had been very impressed
by one of Oilman's articles. See Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An Ameri-
can Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 112.
6. Lewis, Main Street, 319.
7. A brief survey of the critical discussions of Lewis's work before the
rebirth of feminism discloses a void insofar as sympathetic understanding
of Carol Kennicott's plight is concerned. She is discussed in terms of the
vacuousness of American idealism rather than in terms of the housewife's
dilemma.
8. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956), 98, 171. See Richard Wight-
man Fox, "Epitaph for Middletown: Robert S. Lynd and the Analysis of
Consumer Culture," in Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears,
The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880—
1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1983), for an account of the genesis of the
study.
9. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "Two Washes in the Morning and a Bridge
Party at Night: The American Housewife Between the Wars," Women
Studies 3 (1976): 147-72, p. 159.
10. David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic
Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1978), 95. 'So-
il. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribu-
tion to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955),
604.
12. As quoted in Otis Pease, The Responsibilities of American Ad-
vertising: Private Control and Public Influence, 1920-1940 (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958), 35.
13. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 46.
14. Edwin R. A. Seligman, The Economics of Installment Selling: A
Study in Consumers' Credit with Special Reference to the Automobile
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927), 118.
15. For a collection of brilliant essays dealing with this subject, see
Fox and Lears, The Culture of Consumption.
16. Warren I. Susman, "Scarcity vs. Abundance: A Dialectic of Two
Cultures," The Nation (Feb. 16, 1985).
NOTES 257
17. Paula S. Pass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth
in the 19205 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 98.
18. John B. Watson, Psychological Care of Infant and Child (Lon-
don: George Allen and Unwin, 1928), 9.
19. Ibid., ii.
20. There is an excellent, balanced discussion of Watson in Pass, The
Damned and the Beautiful,l, 100-107. She insists that he never repre-
sented the "major tendency" of child-care thought in this country. One
reason that I am convinced that Watson did have a significant influence,
however, is the testimony of my mother, Alberta Ingles. Although she
has never mentioned Watson by name, she has described a child-care
orthodoxy that existed around the rime of my birth (1938) that placed so
much emphasis on rigid schedules and sternness that she felt guilty every
time that she picked me up.
21. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 266.
22. Ladies Home Journal (June 1923).
23. The contrast between Lewis's view of the legitimacy of a woman's
demands on her husband in Main Street and in Arrowsmith is quite dra-
matic. Evidently his own first marriage had gone sour in the intervening
years.
24. Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (New York: New American Library,
1964), 419, 427, 428.
25. Marilyn Power Goldberg, "Housework as a Productive Activity:
Changes in the Content and Organization of Household Production,"
unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1977,
p. 2of.
26. John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose (Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 33.
27. Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer (New York: Business
Bourse, 1929), 23.
28. Ibid., 81.
29. Ibid., 177-80.
30. Carl A. Naether, Advertising to Women (New York: Prentice-
Hall, 1928), 27.
3 i . I should make it clear that I am not trying to argue that there was
any conspiratorial intent. The home economists no doubt believed that
they were acting in the best interests of women themselves as well as in
the interests of manufacturers.
32. Although I do not have the figures for the 1920$, I do have them
258 NOTES
for the modern period. In a book published in 1980, Marjorie East gives
the total of 225,000 home economists in the country; about 75,000 are
involved in education (teachers, extension home economists), 5,000 of
them "develop or promote or interpret products," and the rest work for
public agencies and the like. See East, Home Economics: Past, Present,
and Future (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1980), 4.
33. Ladies Home Journal (Jan. 1920). In her witty book about
women and cooking at the turn of the century, Laura Shapiro singles out
Crisco as the quintessential product symbolizing the attempt to alienate
consumers from their taste buds.
With the Crisco white sauce, scientific cookery arrived at a food sub-
stance from which virtually everything had been stripped except a
certain number of nutrients and the color white. Only a cuisine
molded by technology could prosper on such developments, and it
prospered very well. . . . Between World War I and the 19605,
generations of women were persuaded to leave the past behind when
they entered the kitchen, and to ignore what their senses told them
while they were there.
Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Cen-
tury (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 2i5f.
34. The articles were in the Nov. 1928, May 1929, June 1929, and
Dec. 1929 issues of the Journal.
35. "Science Serves the Homemaker" (April 1933).
36. See also Eleanor Gilbert, "Why I Hate My Independence," Ladies
Home Journal (March 1920); Eugene Davenport, "You Can Change the
World," Ladies Home Journal (Jan. 1922); Corra Harris, "The Happy
Woman," Ladies Home Journal (Nov. 1923).
37. Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework
(New York: Pantheon, 1982), chapter 13 passim.
38. Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and Ameri-
can Political Society, 1780-1920," American Historical Review 89 (June
1984): 620-47, PP- 644, 645.
39. The advertisement was in the Ladies Home Journal of Feb. 1938,
p. 51. See the discussion of this theme in Stuart Ewen, "The Captains
of Consciousness: The Emergence of Mass Advertising and Mass Con-
sumption in the 19205," Ph.D. dissertation, State Univ. of New York at
Albany, 1974, pp. 181-85.
40. Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont, Eating in America: A
History (New York: William Morrow, 1976), 225. These authors state
NOTES 259
that in 1900, 95 percent of all flour sold was for home use and by 1970
the figure was only 15 percent. Laura Shapiro points out that women
proved frustratingly (to the home economists) resistant to scientific ad-
vice at first. Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 172, 173.
41. For a brilliant discussion of the theoretical issues involved in ex-
plaining the ascendancy of modern advertising, see T. J. Jackson Lears,
"The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," Ameri-
can Historical Review 90 (June 1985): 567-93. According to Lears, "As
[Antonio] Gramsci understood, the hegemonic culture depends not on the
brainwashing of 'the masses' but on the tendency of public discourse
to make some forms of experience readily available to consciousness while
ignoring or suppressing others" (p. 577). As I see it, the public discourse
of the early twentieth century made nothing available to women that
would have given them the leverage to resist the persuasion of advertise-
ments—especially when the advertisements were echoed by the advice of
experts.
42. Abraham Myerson, The Nervous Housewife (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1920), 231.
43. Ibid., 77.
44. Ibid., 78.
45. Abraham Myerson, "Remedies for the Housewife's Fatigue," Ladies
Home Journal (March 1930).
46. Marian Castle, "I Rebel at Rebellion," Woman's Journal (July
193°)-
EIGHT Naming the Problem

1. One could make a case for Eleanor Roosevelt. It seems to me, how-
ever, that her greatest acceptance and greatest achievement came in her
widowhood after the war.
2. "It's a Woman's World," Ladies Home Journal (July 1940); see
also Rose Wilder Lane, "Woman's Place Is in the Home," Ladies Home
Journal (Oct. 1936), and Mary Roberts Rinehart, "I Speak for Wives,"
Ladies Home Journal (Feb. 1937).
3. Olga Knopf, M.D., "Marriage and a Job," Ladies Home Journal
(March 1941).
4. Pearl S. Buck, Of Men and Women (New York: John Day, 1941),
44-
5. Ibid.
260 NOTES
6. Dolores Barracano Schmidt, "The Great American Bitch," College

English 32 (May 1971): 900-905.
7. Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth (New York: Random House, Modern
Library, 1947), 2^{.
8. Ibid., 94.
9. George Kelly, "Craig's Wife," (New York: Samuel French, 1926).
10. Schmidt, "The Great American Bitch"; see also Barbara Ehren-
reich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Com-
mitment (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983).
11. See, for example, Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles,
family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II (West-
post, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); D'Ann Campbell, Women at War
with America (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984).
12. Woman's Home Companion (Oct. 1943), 101.
13. General Foods' sales to the federal government went from
$1,477,000 in 1941 to $37,840,000 in 1944. See Richard J. Hooker,
Food and Drink in America: A History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
i98O,333-
14. Campbell, Women at War with America, 172-74.
15. Anderson, Wartime Women, 90, 91.
16. Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American
Woman in the 10405 (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 166.
17. Harriette Arnow, The Dollmaker (New York: Macmillan, 1954),
59*
18. Ibid., 188.
19. Ibid., 253.
20. Ibid., 448.
21. Alfred Toombs, "War Babies," Woman's Home Companion (April
1944). See also "Eight-Hour Orphans," Saturday Evening Post (Oct. 10,
1942).
22. William H. Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social,
Economic, and Political Roles, 1920—1970 (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1972), 159-72. For a case study of one state, see George N. Otey,
"New Deal for Oklahoma's Children: Federal Day Care Centers, 1933-
1946," Chronicles of Oklahoma 60 (Fall 1984): 296—311.
23. Elizabeth Hawes, "Woman War Worker: A Case History," New
York Times (Dec. 26, 1943); "How America Lives," Ladies Home Jour-
nal (Oct. 1942).
24. Chafe, The American Woman, 160-62.
NOTES 261
25. Karen Anderson concludes that the war was responsible for a
"relative decline in the status of homemaking." Anderson, Wartime
Women, 90, 91.
26. Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York: Rinehart and
Company, 1955), 199.
27. Ibid., 200.
28. Life (Jan. 29, 1945).
29. Life (June 16, 1947).
30. See the discussion in Chafe, The American Woman, chapters 8
and 9.
31. Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, Modern Woman:
The Lost Sex (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947).
32. Eileen Sharpe, "Strangers in Town," Ladies Home Journal (Aug.
1956).
33. Clifford R. Adams, Ladies Home Journal (Sept. 1950).
34. The mention of Lucy Ricardo is a tantalizing reminder of how
rich the materials on depictions of housewives in the media must be.
That, however, would be another study.
35. Robert Coughlin, Life (Dec. 24, 1956).
36. Louella G. Shover, "Quick and Easys for Two," Ladies Home
Journal (Jan. 1948).
37. Peg Bracken, The 1 Hate To Cook Book (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World, 1960).
38. "The Plight of the Young Mother," Ladies Home Journal (Feb.
1956).
39. "Love, Death and the Hubby Image," Playboy, 1963, as quoted
in Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men, 48.
40. Ibid., chapter 6, "Reasons of the Heart," passim.
41. As quoted in Diane Middlebrook, "Becoming Anne Sexton," Den-
ver Quarterly iB (Winter 1984): 23-34, P- 23^
42. Diane Middlebrook, "Housewife into Poet: The Apprenticeship of
Anne Sexton," New England Quarterly (June 1984): 483-503, p. 483.
43. Anne Sexton to Anthony Hecht, May 24, 1961, in Anne Sexton:
A Self Portrait in Letters, Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames, eds. (Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 123.
44. "Housewife," in Anne Sexton: The Complete Poems (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 77.
45. Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1955), 206.
262 NOTES
46. Evan S. Connell, Jr., Mrs. Bridge (New York: Viking, 1959),
238. I am indebted to Michael Morey for calling this book to my atten-
tion.
47. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1963),
21, 27.
48. Betty Friedan Papers, Radcliffe Women's Archives, Schlesinger
Library, Box 10.
49. Phyllis McGinley, Sixpence in Her Shoe (New York: Macmillan,
1964), 41, 47.
50. Judith Lynn Abelew Birnbaum, "Life Patterns, Personality Style
and Self Esteem in Gifted Family Oriented and Career Committed
Women," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Michigan, 1971,
p. 246. See Table 3, p. io6ff., for the statistical data on self-esteem
among the eighty-one women.
51. Birnbaum data, case #105, Henry Murray Center, Radcliffe Col-
lege.
Afterwordrd
i. See Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Libera-
tion in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Leftft (New York: Al-
fred A. Knopf, 1979), and Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of
Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present
(New York: Basic Books, 1985), for information about the impression
made on white women by the southern black women.
Appendix;
TABLE i. Total Population and Household Size: 1790 to 1970
Total Individuals
Population Households per
Year (Millions) (Millions) Household
1790 3-9 0.6 7.0
1800 5-3 —
—
1810 7.2 — —
1820 9.6
— —
1830 12.9
— —
1840 17.1
— —
1850 23-2 3-6 6.4
1860 3i-4 5.2 6.0
1870 38.6 7.6 5-i
1880 50.2 9-9 5.0
1890 62.9 12.7 5.0
1900 76.0 16.0 4-8
1910 92.0 20.3 4-5
1920 105.7 24.4 4-3
1930 122.8 29.9 4-i
1940 I3I-7 34-9 3-8
1950 150.7 43-6 3-5
1960 179-3 52.8 3-4
1970 203.2 63-4 3-2
Source: U.S. Census.
263
264 APPENDIX
TABLE 2. Occupied Housing Units and Home Owner-

ship: 1890 to 1970
Housing Percent
Units Owner
Year (Millions) Occupied
1890 12.7 47-8
1900 1 6.0 46.7
1910 20.3 45-9
1920 24.4 45-6
193° 29.9 47-8
1940 34-9 43.6
1950 42.8 55.0
1960 53.0 61.9
1970 63.5 62.9

APPENDIX 265
TABLE 3. Children per 1,000 Women by Race: 1800 to 1970
Children Children Children Children

under Five under Five Ever Born Ever Born
per 1,000 per 1,000 per 1,000 per 1,000
White Black White Black
Year Women* Women* Women1" Womenb
1800 1,,342
— — —
1810 1,,358
— — —
1820 1,,295
1830 1,,145 — — —
— — —
1840 1,,085
— — —
1850 892 1,087
— —
1860 905 1,072
1870 814 — —
997 — —
1880 780 1,090
— —
1890 685 930
1900 666 845 — —
— —
1910 631 736 2,806 3,237
1920 604 608
506 — —
i93«> 554 —
1940 419 —
1,870 2,096
513
1950 580 663 1,828 2,089
1960 717 895 2,253 2,808
1970 507 689 2,285 2,976

• Children under 5 years old per 1,000 women 20 to 44 years old. "Adjusted"
and "standardized" data.
b
Children ever born to women ever married 15 to 44 years old.
*66 APPENDIX
TABLE 4. Domestic Servants: 1800 to 1970
Domestic
Servants Servants
Households (Hundreds of per Ten
Year (Millions) Thousands)* Households
1800 0.4 —
—
1810 0.7
1820 — i.i —
— —
1830
—
1.6 —
1840 2.4 —
1850 —
3-6 3-5 I.O
1860 5.2 6.0 1.2
1870 7.6 IO.O i-3
1880 9-9 "•3 I.I
1890 12.7 15.8 1.2
1900 16.0 18.0 I.I
1910 20.3 20.9 I.O
1920 24.4 16.6 0.7
193° 29.9 22.7 0.8
1940 34-9 23.0 0.7
1950 43-6 20. o 0.5
1960 52.8 24.9 0.5
1970 63.4
• Ten or more years old.
APPENDIX 267
TABLE 5. Women in the Civilian Labor Force (Millions'): 1890 to 1970
Widowed or
Year Total Single Married Divorced
1890 3-7i 2-53 0.52 0.67
1900 5.00 3-31 0.77 0.92
1910* 7.64 4.60 1.89 1.15
1920 8-35 6-43b 1.92 —
193° 10.63 5-74 3-°7 1.83
1940 13.01 6.38 4.68 1.96
1950 16.55 5.27 8.64 2.64
1960 22.41 5.28 13.61 3-52
1970 30.76 6.94 19.18 4.64

• 1910 data not comparable with earlier or later censuses due to difference in
basis of enumeration.
b
Includes widowed or divorced.
TABLE 6. Women in the Civilian Labor force (Percent of Female Popu-

lation'): 1890 to 1970
Widowed or
Year Total Single Married Divorced
1890 18.9 40.5 4.6 29.9
1900 20. 6 43-5 5-6 32-5
1910' 25.4 51.1 10.7 34-i
1920 23-7 46.4" 9.0
—
1930 24.8 50.5 11.7 34-4
1940 25.8 45-5 15.6 30.2
1950 29.0 46.3 23.0 32-7
1960 34-5 42.9 31-7 36.1
1970 41.6 50.9 40.2 36.8

11
1910 data not comparable with earlier or later censuses due to difference in
basis of enumeration.
b
Includes widowed or divorced.
268 APPENDIX
TABLE 7. Life Expectancy (t« Years) by Race and Sex: 1900 to 1970
Entire
Year Population Men Women White Non-White
1900 47-3 46.3 48.3 47.6 33-o
1910 50.0 48.4 51.8 5°-3 35-6
1920 54-i 53-6 54.6 54-9 45-3
193° 59-7 58.1 61.6 61.4 48.1
1940 62.9 60.8 65.2 64.2 S3-'
1950 68.2 65.6 71.1 69.1 60.8
1960 69.7 66.6 73-i 70.6 63.6
1970 70.9 67.1 74.8 71.7 65.3
Index
Adams, Henry, 112 All My Pretty Ones (Anne

Addams, Jane, 65, 88-89, 160, Sexton), 216
161, 198 American Cookery (Amelia
Abolition movement, 73 Simmons), 7-8, 13
Advertising: 164, 168, 171, 179- The American Frugal Housewife
80, 187-88, 193, 194, 218; (Lydia Maria Child), 23-24,
advice to, by home econo- 47-48
mists, 170; influence on American Revolution, 6, 7, 9
home, 144; language used in, American Woman's Home
188; need to educate con- (Catharine Beecher and
sumers, 188; in novel, 205 Harriet Beecher Stowe), 100,
Advertising to Women (Carl 110
Naether), 188 Anthony, Susan B., 59, 73, 138-
Advice books: 11, 21, 22-27, 2 9> 39
110; by male writers, 26—28, Anti-woman attitudes, in novels,
87; for men, 26-28, 42, 57. 81, 82-83, 91- See also
See also specific titles Women, attacks on
Agassiz, Louis, 124 Architecture of Country Houses
Alcott, Louisa May, 84 (Andrew Jackson Downing),
Alcott, William Andrus, 26—27, 42
28 Arnow, Harriette, 204-5
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 81 Arrowsmith (Sinclair Lewis),
All Around the House, 31 185-86
269
270 INDEX
Arthur, Timothy Shay, 27, 87 Bureau of Home Economics,

Atlantic Monthly, 68 158-59, 160
Authority in the home: 27; in bad- Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 83
boy books, 83; in Tom Saw- Bushnell, Horace, 18-19, 44, 110
yer, 75. See also Home, hier-
archy of power in; Maternal
authority; Patriarchal author- Calvinism, 17-18
ity; Women, moral authority Campbell, Helen, 152, 154-55,
of 160
Automobile, 111—12, 178, 180, Career vs. housework, 31, 143—44,
182, 192, 212 169
Cash nexus, i o
Gather, Willa, 172-75
Catt, Carrie Chapman, 136, 143—
"The Battle Hymn of the Repub- 44
lic" (Julia Ward Howe), 72 Charity: 26, 57, 62, 64; Emerson
Beecher, Catharine, 7, 24, 31, 43, on, 37; Beecher on, 46, 48
44-48, 72, 100, no, 149—50, Chastity, 33
169. See also A Treatise on Chemistry, helpful to housewives,
Domestic Economy 23
Beecher, Eunice (wife of Henry Child, Lydia Maria, 23, 36, 47-
Ward), 31 48, 101
Beecher, Henry Ward, 18-20, 41, Child care skills, 221; and World
45, 108, no War II, 205-6
Beecher, Lyman, 18, 45, 51 Children: chores of, 3; discipline
Bellamy, Edward, 93-95, 99, 107, of, 4; domestic education of
112-13, 114, 142 girls, 24-25; education of,
Berger, Meta, 88 19, 20; May on, 61; in novels,
Berger, Victor, 88 75-84; number of, per fam-
Bevier, Isabel, 147, 148, 155-56 ily, 28; raising of, xiv, 61,
Birth rate, decline in, 28 181, 182-83; "scientific"
Black women, southern, roles of, raising of, 182-83
224 Children's literature, 106
Blackwell, Antoinette Brown, xv, Civil rights movement, 224
44-45, 58-61, 114, 127-29, Civil War, 55, 66, 73, 198
130, 134, 137, 139/162 Clarke, Dr. Edward, 125-27
Blackwell, Henry, 137 Class differences, 95, 114
Bracken, Peg, 211 Clothing, women's, 210
Brand names, 170, 172, 179 Cold War, 210
Breckinridge, Sophonisba, 153 Colonial period, 3-9, 11, 17, 21,
Bruere, Martha and Robert, 156 26, 29, 57, 95
Buck, Pearl, 199-200 Common sense philosophy, 19
INDEX 271
Companionate norms, 9-10, 32, 53; open-hearth, 5, 12, 100—

181 i o i; quality of ingredients in,
The Complete Home (Julia M. 13, 104, 105; removal from
Wright),, i lo-n home, 99, 113; renewed in-
A Connecticut Yankee in King terest in, 225; and rural
Arthur's Court (Mark women, 161-62; and south-
Twain), 80 ern black women, xvi, 224;
Connell, Evan, 2,16-17 new technology for, 12-13,
Consumption: 168, 172, 197; 100-103; and science, 142,
brand names, 170, 172, 179; 149; scientific substitutes for,
and home, 186; and house- 188-89; skills needed in, 112;
wives, 202; rise of installment skills of reformer Stanton,
buying, 180; and social in- 138; Terhune on, 167; uten-
justice, 170 sils, u, 12; utilitarian, 5-6.
Cook, Clarence, 79 See also Food processing in-
Cookbooks: 5, 7-8, 13, 17, 21, dustry; Nutrition
2.9, 149, 166, 167-68, 170; Cooking schools, 148-49
mid-1 gth century, 6, 13, 104 Cooperative housekeeping, 97-98
Cookery: baking, 5, 13-14, 29, Craft tradition: 112, 181, 225;
96, 104; chemical leavening assault on, 188; and con-
in, 8-9, 13, 168; colonial, 5, sumption, 168; denigrated by
7-8; cookstove, use of, 12, home economists, 146, 150,
l o o — i o r ; decline in, 104—5, 151, 163-65; in novels, 173,
211-12; deskilling trends in, 177, 205; in domestic novels,
8-9, 105—6, 203; economy 65; loss of, 192, 204; and
in, 24; education in, 148—49; scientific management, 154;
education of domestics in, 97; transfer of, 14-17. See also
effect of World War II on, Cookery; Domestic chores;
202—3; family meals provide Needlework; Sewing
intimacy, 113, 142; Frederick Craig's Wife (George Kelly), 201,
on, 169; Gilman on, 142; 202
home economists on, 154-55, Crane, Stephen, 106—7
164, urge tasteless food, 189; Crawford, Joan, 201
homemade vs. processed food, "Creative waste," 187
164, 189-90, 192, 194; of Croly, Herbert, 156
immigrants, 174, new diet
for immigrants, 163; impact
of industrialization on, 105; Darwin, Charles: 61, 116—33
nadir of, 211-12; native in- passim, 140; on men and
gredients, use of, 8; in novels, male activity, 117,120—21,
109, 174-75, 204, 205; in 123, 130—31; personality of,
domestic novels, 25-26, 51, 118, 19-20; theory of sexual
272 INDEX
Darwin, Charles (Cont.) shared, xiv, 34, 62, 111, 113,

selection, 117, 119, 120, 121; in novel, 177, Buck on, 200;
on superiority of men, 120— skills needed in, 134, 181, of
21; theories of, acceptance in southern black women, 224,
U.S., 124. See also Evolution- in novels, 173-75, I77>
ary theory; Natural selection; standardization of, Frederick
Sexual selection on, 169; status of those who
Darwinian evolution, 115 perform, 114, 139; super-
Davis, Rebecca Harding, 44 vision of, by housewife, 4.
Degler, Carl, 9-10, 28, 32 See also Gender system;
Depression, the, 192 Housework
The Deserted Wifee (Emma Domestic Duties (Frances Parkes),
D. E. N. Southworth), 22, 22
68-69 Domestic Service (Lucy Salmon),
Dewey, Melvil, 145 38
Diseases: in domestic novel, 26; Downing, Andrew Jackson, 42
in home, Gilman on, 141, Dynamic Sociology (Lester Frank
142; home economists on, Ward), 131
i?5
Divorce, 32
Dodsworth (Sinclair Lewis), 200- Economics, and advice for house-
201, 202 wives, 156
The Dollmaker (Harriette Economy in home, 24, 29
Arnow), 204-5 Education: of children, 19, 20; of
Domestic chores: arduousness of, domestic servants, 97; of girls,
24, 64, 98-99, 103, 190, 24-25, Clarke on, 126, home
Myerson on, 194-95, in novel, economists on, 169; in home
176-77; before running economics, 157—58; of
water, 103; Blackwell on, 60; women, 21, 22, 24, 27, 64,
ceremonial or ornamental, 6, 218, 223, by advertisers, 188;
i i-i 2; deskilling, 112; dis- of women, damaging to repro-
tribution of, xiv, 4, 11—12, ductive systems, 122, 126,
34. 37, 57, 60, 61, 162, 127; of women, Darwin on,
Blackwell on, 129; education 133, Spencer on, 122, 133,
needed for, Wollstonecraft Talbot on, 152, Wollstone-
on, 137; efficiency of, 157; craft on, 137
Gilman on, 140, 141-42; Efficiency: 171, 184; in home, 24,
high status of, Myerson on, 168-69, Gilbreth on, 161; vs.
194-95; list of tasks, 98-99; waste, 190—91
loneliness of, Myerson on, Electrical appliances, 172, 178-79,
195; rationalization of, 150; 189
and reproductive burden, 29; Electricity, 102, 178
INDEX 273
Eliot, T. S., 78 34, 36, 59-62, 1141 impact

Ellis, Havelock, 152 of Darwinism on, 117; po-
Emerson, Lidian, 38—39 larization of, due to temper-
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 36-39, ance, 67; in Tom Sawyer,
43, 57, "4 77-78
Eugenics, 163 A Generation of Viperss (Philip
Evans, Augusta, 69-71 Wylie), 207
Evolutionary change, Darwin and Gilbreth, Frank, 157
Lamarck on, 117 Gilbreth, Lillian, 157, 161, 162
Evolutionary theory: 169; feminist Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 99-
response to, 100 100, 114, 131, 134-36, 140-
43, 154, !55> '60, 162, 176-
77, 188,219
Gladden, Washington, 109, no
Family size, decline in, 28, 29, 96, Godey's Lady's Book, 17, 42-44,
i°3 66, 71,98, 101, 148, 167,
Farnham, Marynia, 209 185, 198
"Feminine Mystique," 196, 209- Good Housekeeping, 99, 113
221 Gould, Beatrice, 198, 212
The Feminine Mystique (Betty Gould, Bruce, 198
Friedan), 197, 214, 217-20, Government: 169, 223; in domes-
223 tic novel, 26; establishes Bu-
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 184, 202 reau of Home Economics,
Food processing industry, 99, 158-59; home economists
103-4, 164, 179, 202-3, and, 152, 158; "as house-
189-90 keeping" analogy, 88; pam-
Foreign policy, 91 phlets, 158
Fourteenth Amendment, 73 Great Awakening: 18; Second, 62,
Frederick, Christine, 166, 168- 63,64
70, 187-88, 195 Greeley, Horace, 44
Freudianism, 182, 218 Greenwood, Grace, 44
Friedan, Betty, xiv, 172, 197, 199, Grimke, Sarah and Angelina, 46
209-10, 211, 212, 214, Grocery stores, 179
217-20
Fuller, Margaret, 49
Hale, Sarah Josepha, 42-44, 45,
49, 66, 71, 148, 198
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 187 Hambidge, Gove, 189-90
Gallon, Sir Frances, 120 Harland, Marion (Mary Virginia
Gender system: asymmetrical, 34, Terhune), 52
60, 61, 89, 90; Blackwell on, Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 39-41, 43
59-61; egalitarian, xv, 32, Hayden, Dolores, 100, 114
2/4 INDEX
Hearth and Home, 44, 56, 97, 98, 171; impact of World War II
103, 138 on, 202—6; and industrializa-
Hedonism, 193-94 tion, 92-94, 100, 109; iso-
Hemingway, Ernest, 202 lates women, 154; kitchen
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, design, 169-70; manufacture
44 of products, 3, n, 98, 181-
Hired help: 3, 5, 11-12, 14, 25, 82, 192; May on, 61-62;
3°. 3^.33.37.96, 178, 179. "moral sanctities," 144; as
220; domestic education of, nurturing environment, 9, i o;
97, in domestic novels, 25, vs. outside world, 26, 35-36,
32; in domestic novels, 96; 38, 65, no, 114, 121, 144;
history of, in America, 95- political role of, 7, 27, 34, 57,
96; for laundry, 103; reform 86-87, 181; privacy in, 5;
of domestic service, 97-98; religious role of, 17, 19, 21,
"servant problem," 95-97, 53; as social center, 5; as
103 symbol of integration, 10; and
Hofstadter, Richard, 116, 131-32 technology, 112; trivializa-
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 43 tion of, 90, 114, 142, 162-63,
Home: architecture of, 5, 41-42, 195; transcendent role of, 94,
43, 97, 169-70; attacks on, 95, 114; urban, 5; values of,
131, 134, 140, 141, 155, in reforming society, 35, 62, 150
novels, 175-76; Beecher on, Home (Catharine Sedgwick), 25,
37-38, 41; Blackwell on, 59- 33.7i
61; business and, 184, 186; Home economics: 88, 142, 150,
Clemens on, 80; colonial, 152; beginning of, 145, 150;
3-9, 26, 57; commodification criticisms of, 162; and dignity
of, 112; and Darwinism, 117, of housework, 169; education
121—22; in domestic novel, in, 145, 148, 157-58; and
26, 67—68, in later novels, government, 166; link to rural
106—7, 108; economy in, 24, areas, 161—62, 166; sample
153; educational role of, 7, 9; courses in^ 152, 165—66
efficiency in, 24, 94, 153, Home economists: and advertising,
170; Emerson on, 37-38, 41; 170-71, 188; attacks on
emotional role of, 181; as en- housewives, 159, 163, on
tertainment, 184; Fitzgerald tradition, 163-64, 190; dis-
on, 184; Gilman on, 140-41; dain of older women, 165;
as haven, 10, 184-85, 186, goals of, 152, 153, 154; mis-
210; Hawthorne on, 39—41; trust of tastebuds, 164; and
hierarchy of power in, 4, 26, reform community, 160
27, 37,41,65, 68, 182, 185, Hooker, Isabella Beecher, 45
212; and history, 57; home Hospitality, Emerson on, 37-38,
economists' goal for, 166, 57
INDEX 275
The House of the Seven Gables those who perform, xiv; per-
(Nathaniel Hawthorne), 39- formance of, xv; profession-
41, 80 alization of, 98-100; rou-
Household appliances: 101, 180, tinized, 195; time spent on,
187-88, 203; home econo- i n . See also Domestic chores
mists' influence on, 157; in Housing: 212; shortage, during
novel, 205. See also Electrical World War II, 202, 203-4
appliances Howe, Julia Ward, 72-73, 126-
Housewives: against reform, 195- 27, 198
96; careers create "double Howe, Samuel Gridley, 72-73
burden," 23; as chauffeurs, Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain),
xiv, 111, 192; as consumers, 78-81
153, 158, 159-60, 186-87, Hunt, Caroline, 160-61
Frederick on, 187; emulate
business world, 197; as equal
partners, xiv, 9-10, 32; vs.
experts, 156; Friedan on, I Hate to Cook Book (Peg
218-19; home economists' Bracken), 211
critique of, 154-56; home "1 Love Lucy," 210
economists distance them- Ike Partington (Benjamin
selves from, 150; leisure time Shillaber), 82
of, n, 14; loneliness of, 221; Immigrants: 32, 95, 149, 163,
middle-class, 10—11; moral 174; Irish, 25, 32, 37, 95, 96;
stature of, loss of, 200, ner- in novels, 173-75, 177
vousness of, Myerson on, Immigration, 10
194-95; New England, 33; In His Steps (Rev. Charles
predatory, in post-World War Sheldon), 107-9
I literature, 200-201; role Increasing Home Efficiency
of, Buck on, 199—200; sacri- (Martha and Robert Bruere),
fice of, for family, 196; self- 156-57
esteem of, 6, 29; social dimen- Industrialization: 4, 10, n, 36;
sion of, home economists on, effect on home, 109; and role
152; supervision of hired of women, 160
help, 12; training of, value for Infant mortality rate, home econo-
society, 156-57; twentieth- mists on, 155
century, xiii-xiv. See also
Women
Housework: and careers, 31, 143-
44, 169; dignity of, when a Jazz Age, hedonism of, 180—81,
science, 169; in domestic 183, 184, 186
novel, 25; economic analysis Jefferson, Thomas, 18
of, 187; inferior status of Jones, Nellie Kedzie, 161
276 INDEX
Kennedy, John F., 217 Magazines: men's, 212-13;

women's, 97, 156, 182, 188,
197, 205-6, 208, 212, 213,
La Follette, Belle, 160-61
219. See also individual titles
Ladies Home Journal: 65, 88, 168,
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
182, 184, 185, 188-89, 190,
(Stephen Crane), 106-7
191-92, 195, 198, 203, 207,
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
208,209,
208, 209,9, 2 1 0 , 2 1 1 , 2 1 2 , 214;
(Sloan Wilson), 216
"credo for the new woman"
Mann, Mary Peabody, 97
(1920), 191
Manners or Happy Homes and
Laissez-faire, 132
Good Society . . . (Sarah
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 117, 121
Josepha Hale), 71—72
Lamarckianism, 131, 132
Marriage: 22; in advice book, 27;
Laundry: 98, 103, ii2;Beecher
companionate norms, 9-10,
on, 48; Frederick on, 169;
32; distribution of power in,
new technology for, 102
28, 32; in domestic novels,
League of Women Voters, 158
69; early, 210; Howe on, 72;
Leisure time, n, 12-13, 17, 178,
role of, in religion, 18, 19
191
"Material feminists," 100, 113—14,
Lewis, Sinclair, 172, 175-77, 185-
86, 200—201, 202 H5
Maternal authority, 182
Life magazine, 207—8, 211
Maternal nurture, 4, 9
Lincoln, Abraham, 43, 57
Mather, Cotton, 20
Lippmann, Walter, 156
May, Samuel, 45, 61—62, 114
Little Lord Fauntleroy (Frances
Men: activity of, 4, 115, 117,
Hodgson Burnett), 83-84
Darwin on, 117, 120—21,
Little Men (Louisa May Alcott),
123, 130—31, Gilman on,
84
140—41; advice books by,
Little Women (Louisa May Al-
26-28, 87; advice books for,
cott), 84
26-28, 42, 57, 199, 213;
Locke, John, 9
attacks on male culture, 67;
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 50
authority of, 4, 9, 32; catered
Looking Backward (Edward Bel-
to, by women, 210, 213; de-
lamy), 93-95, i°7, 142 picted in novels, 200-202, in
Lundberg, Ferdinand, 209
domestic novels, 70, in
Lyell, Sir Charles, 117-18
"bachelor books," 85; fears of,
Lynd, Robert and Helen, 177—78
202; freedom of, Stanton on,
138, Twain on, 76-78, 80-
McCall's, 212-13 81; health of, 213; improvi-
McGinley, Phyllis, 220—21 dent, 23; middle-class, 26;
Main Street (Sinclair Lewis), 172, position of, home economists
175-77 on, 162; professionals, 159;
INDEX 277
public and domestic roles of, Natural selection: 118, 123, 124,
60, 61—62; and reform, 57, 132; Spencer on, 122-23
73; responsible for advances Nature (Ralph Waldo Emerson),
in home, 141, 155; self- 36-37
sacrifice, practice of, 48; Needlework, 13, 17, 29, 43, 96.
sexual appetite of, 28, 29, See also Sewing
Ward on, 132; status of, re- "Neo-Lamarckianism," 124
garding age, 165; superiority The Nervous Housewife (Dr.
to women, Darwin on, 120- Abraham Myerson), 194-95
21, 122-23; women's distrust New England housewife, 33
of, 73 The New Housekeeping (Chris-
Of Men and Women (Pearl tine Frederick), 170
Buck), 199-200 Nineteenth Amendment, 159, 191
Mendel, Gregor, 124 Norwood (Henry Ward Beecher),
Middle class, xvi 19—20, 108—9
Middletown (Robert and Helen Novels: Age of Jackson, 6, 11;
Lynd), 177-78 "bachelor books," 85; "bad
Mill, John Stuart, in domestic boy" sub-genre, 81-83, 87;
novel, 70 and devaluation of domes-
Mitchell, Donald Grant (Ik ticity, 91; "domestic novel"
Marvel), 85 genre, n, 15, 21-22, 49, 51,
Mitchell, Maria, 146 64-65, 66, 67, 71, 106, 165,
Mobility, geographic, 63 166, 167; iSth-century, 6;
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex post-World War I, 200; tem-
(Ferdinand Lundberg and perance literature, 87. See
Marynia Farnham), 209, 210 also specific titles
Monopolization, 93 Nutrition: 162; scientific principles
Montagu, Ashley, 212 of, 149; value of tasteless
Morris, William, 152 food, 151
Motherhood: devaluation of, Gil-
man on, 141; Myerson on,
195 Oldtown Folks (Harriet Beecher
Movies, 183 Stowe), 15, 44
Mrs. Bridge (Evan Connell), 216- On the Origin of Species (Charles
17 Darwin), 117, 118, 123
My Antonia (Willa Gather), 172-
75, 177
Myerson, Dr. Abraham, 194—95 Parker, Theodore, 20, 45, 56-57,
65, 88, no, 123, 134, 171
Parloa, Maria, 145, 149
Naether, Carl, 188 Patriarchal authority, 4, 9, 32
Nationalism movement, 93 Peck, George, 82-83
278 INDEX
Peirce, Charles, 97, 125 needed by housewives, 23;

Peirce, Melusina Fay, 97 undermined by Darwinism,
Photoplay, 208 117
Physicians, and advice to women Reproduction, Darwin on, 117
to stay at home, 135-36 Reproductive system: 61; of
Playboy, 213 women, 127; damaged by
Plays, housewives depicted in, 201 education, Clarke on, 126,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 43 Spencer on, 122
Politics, women in: Beecher on, Republican Motherhood, 21, 26,
46; Blackwell on, 59-61; 27,45,62, 63-64,93, 117
Stowe on, 56. See also Republicanism: 92-93; vs. con-
Women, political role of sumption, 180
Poor Richard's Almanac, 24 Reveries of a Bachelor (Donald
"Problem that has no name," 172, Grant Mitchell), 85
197, 199, 217 Revolution (journal of the
Products: manufactured in home, NWSA), 98, 138
3, 11,98, 181-82, 192; pur- Romantic Evangelicalism, 18—19,
chased outside home, n, 13, 108
98, 99, 178 Richards, Ellen Swallow, 145,
Progressive movement, 163 146-47, 148, 149, 151, 152,
Prohibition, 202 155, 160, 162, 163
Protestantism, 17-21, 29, 95, 108, Richards, Robert Hallowell, 147
109, no, 144 Richardson, Samuel, 9
Psychological adjustment: 195; Roosevelt, Theodore, 85, 87
housewives responsible for, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 9
182 Running water, 178
Rush, Benjamin, 21
Ruskin, John, 152
Russell, Rosalind, 201
Racism, 123 Ruth Hall (Fanny Fern), 22
"Rationalization," 142-43 Ryan, Mary, 14
Rauschenbusch, Walter, 109-10
Reconstruction, politics of, 73
Reform movement, negative aspects
of, 89-91,112 St. Elmo (Augusta Evans), 69-71
Refrigeration, 101—2 Salmon, Lucy, 38, 96
Religion: in domestic novel, 25; Sanitary science, 147—48, 162
erosion of traditional belief, Schlafly, Phyllis, xiv
124—2 5, 181; role of home Schools, effect of World War II
in, 17—19; role of women in, on, 204
20—21, 62—63; selection of Science: applied to home, accepti-
clergymen, 46; training in, bility of women studying,
INDEX 279
148; in the home, 146, Shillaber, Benjamin P., 81, 82

Beecher on, 48, 149; place Shopping, 23
in American culture, 124-25 Sigourney, Lydia, 25-26, 33
Scientific management: 153-54, Sixpence in Her Shoe (Phyllis
157, 161, 184; Frederick on, McGinley), 220
169; in the workplace, 154 Slavery: emancipation, 66; Fugi-
Sedgwick, Catharine, 25, 33, 42 tive Slave Act, 49, 50; homes
Selling Mrs. Consumer (Christine as resource to fight against,
Frederick), 170, 187-88 57; Stowe on, 49-50
Servants. See Hired help Soap opera, radio, 209
Sewing, 29—30, 101 Social Darwinism, 85
Sewing machines, i o I Social Darwinism in American
Sex in Education; or a Fair Thought (Richard
Chance for the Girls ((Dr. Hofstadter), 116
Edward Clarke), 125-26 Social Gospel Protestantism, 108,
Sex, 27-28 109, 110
Sexes: biological differences in, Sociobiology, 129-31
61, 90, 123, 127, Darwin on, Southworth, Emma D. E. N., 68
117, 121, Spencer on, 122; Spencer, Herbert, 122-23, 126,
differences in, 127, 128, 128, 130-31, 132-33, 140
Ward on, 32-33; intellectual Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 73, 138
differences in, 123, Darwin Stan ton, Henry, 138
on, 120, Spencer on, 122—23; Stone, Lucy, 58, 59, 88, 90, 137
equality of, Blackwell on, The Story of a Bad Boy (Thomas
128-29, Clarke on, 126, Gil- Bailey Aldrich), 81-82
man and Ward on, 131; per- Stowe, Calvin, 30
sonality of, 61, 90; relative Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 12, 14-
to natural world, Gilman on, 15. 3°. 34, 43, 44, 45, 48~
140, Ward on, 132—33 57, 68, 96, 97, 98, 100, 107,
The Sexes Throughout Nature 135, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173,
(Antoinette Brown Black- 174, 198
well), 127 The Study of Sociology (Herbert
Sexton, Anne, 214-16 Spencer), 122
Sexual politics: 65, 66, 67, 87, Suffrage: black, 73; movement,
202; in novels, 84 137—39; National Woman
Sexual roles, 89, 90. See also Suffrage Association, 73;
Gender system white manhood, 10, 66-67;
Sexual selection, 117, 119, 120, woman, 43, 45, 56, 65, 66,
121, 123, 131 67, 69, 73, 86-88, 198, 202;
Sexual symmetry, 162. See also and WCTU, 86
Gender system, egalitarian Sumner, Charles, 56
Sheldon, Rev. Charles, 107-8, 110 Sumner, William Graham, 132
z8o INDEX
Talbot, Marion, 147-48, 152, Vindication of the Rights of

153, 160 Women (Mary Wollstone-
Technology: before electricity, craft), 136-37
102; electricity, 102, 103;
and the home, 112; provides
relief to housewife, i oo; and Wallace, Alfred Russel, 118
refrigeration, 101-2; running Ward, Lester Frank, 131-34, 140,
water, 103; and sewing ma- 152
chines, 101; and stoves, loo Warner, Susan, 67-68, 173
Temperance: literature, 87; male Watson, John B., 182-83
leadership for, 85; in Torn Weismann, August, 124
Sawyer, 77; women's organi- The Wide, Wide, World (Susan
zations for, 62, 67, 74, 85. Warner), 15, 21, 67-68, 173
See also Woman's Christian Willard, Frances, 85, 86, 88-89,
Temperance Union 97
Ten Nights in a Barroom (Timo- Wilson, Sloan, 216
thy Shay Arthur), 27, 87 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 136-37
Terhune, Mary Virginia (Marion Woman's Christian Temperance
Harland), 52 Union (WCTU): 85-87,
Thompson, Dorothy, 198—99 88, 158; and suffrage, 86
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 7, 47, 63 Woman's Home Companion, 182,
Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain), 75- 206
78 Woman's Journal, 59, 88, 98, 126,
A Treatise on Domestic Economy 136, 139, 195-96
(Catharine Beecher), 7, 12, Woman to the Rescue (Timothy
45-47, no, 149, 150 Shay Arthur), 87
True magazine, 213 Women: attacks on, 208, 209,
Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 224, 225, Buck on, 199—200,
74-81,86 in literature, 207—8; author-
Two-career household, 139 ity of, 182; behavior of, 66,
90; biological depiction of,
121, 122, 125, 126; as the
Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet "bitch," 200-202, 213; care
Beecher Stowe), 30, 34, 49- of men, 10, 213; and careers,
55.57 139, 184, 208, 211; as
Unitarianism, 20 chauffeurs, xiv, 111, 192,
Urban problems, 89 212; colonial, 6, 29, 57; as
Urbanization, 13, 93, 198, 177 consumers, 170, 188, 192;
Darwin on, 117; demoraliza-
tion of, 222; dependent on
Van de Water, Virginia Terhune, men, 140, 199; deskilling
182, 185 processes of, 112; and educa-
INDEX 28l
tion, 46, 48; education of, 21, role of, affected by World
22, 24, 27, 43, 47, 64, 148, War II, 205-9; rural vs.
damaging to reproductive sys- urban, 161; scientists, 148;
tems, 122, 126, 127; educa- segregation of, from men, 22;
tion of, Darwin on, 133, self-confidence of, 64-65;
Spencer on, 122, i33,Woll- self-denial, practice of, 48;
stonecraft on, 137; of elite self-esteem of, 6, 29, 30, 39,
class, 13; esteem of, 22, 27, 193, 211, 212, 221; self-
28; financial independence righteousness of, 90; sexual
of, Beecher on, 47; on the passion of, 28, 29; on slavery,
frontier, 12, 33, 101; idle- 57; in the South, xvi, 224;
ness of, 208; as inferior to sphere of activity of, 4, 3 5—
men, 120-23, 132-34, Ward 36, 59-60, Ward on, 133-
on, 132, Frederick on, 187; 34; unmarried, Anthony on,
in labor force, 223, 224, dur- 139; urban, 11; urged to
ing war, 202-4, 205-6; lack ignore outside world, 198—99,
of freedom in home, in novel, Buck on, 200; working-class,
176; lack of skills of, Gilman in novels, 177; working-class,
on, 142; leisure time of, 191; as servants, 32; writers, 83,
leverage of, 27-28, 67-68, 214; young, health of, 31.
69, 185; life expectancy of, See also Housewives
162; married, Anthony on, Women and Economics (Char-
139; married, rights of, 32, lotte Perkins Gilman), 136
43. 69, 73; and medicine, 43, Workplace, scientific management
71; mental health of, 39, in, 154
209; middle-class, 12, 17, 33; World outside home: 26, 34, 35-
moral authority of, 6, 28, 32, 36, 62, 6;; Emerson on, 38.
34, 46, 67, 90; and need to See also Home, vs. outside
organize, 47, 62, 212; in world
novels, 185-86, 216-17; World War I, 89, 158, 172, 191,
older, 165, 193, attacks on, 200, 202
208, in novels, 175, 208; World War II: 198, 202-10, 212;
political role of, 6, 43, 46, in novel, 204-5
57. 59-65. 73, 88, 89; prob- Wright, Henry Clarke, 27, 42
lems of, home economists on, Wright, Julia M., 110-11
162; and professionalism, Writers, women, 214, 220
166; public and domestic roles Wylie, Philip, 207
of, 60-62; qualities of, 90;
and reform, 57, 73, 137-38,
191, 224; reliance of, on "The Yellow Wallpaper" (Char-
customs and emotions, 169; lotte Perkins Gilman), 136

MATTHEWS, Glenna - Just A Housewife: The Rise & Fall of Domesticity in America

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"Just a Housewife"

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The Rise and Fall of Domesticity

"Housewife" from All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton.

Stanford set a standard of intellectual vitality and passion for our

lengthy stays—include Sandra Mahoney, Larry Mahoney, Debbie

perity but overlooked in discussions of the gross national product.

Beecher Stowe rather than those of a typical housewife. I am neces-

The Emergence of a New Ideology

iIN n 1750 THE COLONIAL AMERICAN HOME was an essential locus

fore the American Revolution women were frequently apologetic

The physical appearance of the home might vary from colony to

of reasons, in 1750 domestic chores were likelier to be approached as

public-spirited citizenry. If citizens must learn to place a high value

The notion that a mother can perform a political function rep-

The home in effect gained a function so political that the domestic

standards of the eighteenth century and a strongly patriotic sensi-

esteem and respect rather than on family property considerations.

Dudden argues that this change enabled middle-class women to de-

Dudden's argument and our growing understanding of material

in the days before baking powder is indicated by a recipe for white

the preparations for a New England Thanksgiving in Oldtown Folks,

"Look here," said Miss Fortune,—"don't you let me hear no

. . . This was Ellen's first introduction to the buttery; she had

In the end there is no satisfactory resolution to the issue of how

young heroine is whisked off to an aristocratic never-never land in

was no coincidence, because what Bushnell and Beecher, among

the hour of his engagement, Cathcart was a different man. Every

But stop. Turn back. We have neglected the heart of home,

It is useful to compare the approach of Bushnell and Beecher with

motherly woman can even educate her husband, he asserted.60 Thus

many of them setting forth extremely positive views of the housewife.

and had exclaimed, "Sometimes I get a little fidgety because I want

it is surely the business of the mistress of a family either to do, or to

leverage within families: Wright and others were counseling men

The details of domestic economy can never be repulsive to the

The point in examining these three male authors is not to suggest

lacking sexual passion—in contrast to earlier Protestant views of Eve

"But, my dear, here is a baby in my arms and two little pussies

While frequently complaining about being overburdened, Stowe

expense of other women, that is, by the exploitation of servants. As

been primarily generated by New England writers to reflect the con-

Finally, although the cult of domesticity did not create an asym-

w HEN THE HOME acquired so diverse and expanded a set of

Furthermore, the intermingling of public and domestic spheres in

I think it plain that this voice of communities and ages, "Give

. . . many things betoken a revolution of opinion and practice

We know that Emerson tried to put this approach into practice in

countrymen and -women to go beyond material comfort and pru-

With these [purely material] ends housekeeping is not beau-

In the second place Emerson's emphasis on the importance of hos-

Unfortunately, however, though Lidian Emerson took pride in her

The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me

had collaborated in the witchcraft prosecution—and execution—of the

Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their

house itself is beyond redemption so Phoebe and Holgrave make

they wanted advice on behavior from Catharine Beecher, Henry

One of the great editors in American history, Sarah Josepha Hale

the political ramifications of domesticity, because Hale had based her

Brown Blackwell developed a view of the home as a source of renewal

Like other writers of the period including Sarah Josepha Hale

As guardians of the home, women had a special role to play. All

In matters pertaining to the education of their children, in the